back to indexMichael Malice: The White Pill, Freedom, Hope, and Happiness Amidst Chaos | Lex Fridman Podcast #150
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The following is a conversation with Michael Malice, his second time on the podcast.
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He's an anarchist, political thinker, podcaster, and author.
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He wrote Dear Reader, which is a book on North Korea, and The New Right, a book on the various
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ideological movements at the fringe of American politics.
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He hosts a podcast called You're Welcome, spelled Y O U R, and in general, there's
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a lot of live shows on YouTube that are at times profoundly absurd, and at other times
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absurdly profound, and always full of humor and wisdom.
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He is the Joker to my Batman, and the Caviar to my Vodka.
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His masterful dance between dark humor and difficult, even dangerous ideas, challenges
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me to think deeply about this world, and when that fails, at least smile and have a good
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laugh at the absurdity of it all.
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This episode has much of that.
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His outfit, for example, the exact inverse of mine, with a white suit and a black shirt,
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is just one example of that, of the humor, trolling, and brilliance that is Michael Malice.
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Quick mention of our sponsors, NetSuite, Business Management Software, Athletic Greens, All
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In One Nutrition Drink, Sun Basket, Meal Delivery Service, and Cash App.
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So the choice is success, health, food, or money.
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Choose wisely, my friends, and if you wish, click the sponsor links below to get a discount
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and to support this podcast.
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As a side note, let me say that Michael is, in many ways, a man of radical ideas, but
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also a man with kindness in his heart.
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Those two things are great ingredients for a fascinating conversation.
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I hope to have several such people on this podcast this upcoming year who also have radical
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ideas about politics, science, technology, and life.
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At times, often perhaps, I might fail at asking the challenging questions that should be asked,
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but I will try my best to do so, and hope to keep improving every time.
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Mostly, I come to these conversations with an open mind and with love.
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Unfortunately, that kind of approach can be taken advantage of in many ways.
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It can be used by reporters or just people online later to highlight how or why I'm
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ignorant or worse, I'm generally not a good human being.
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In the context of this, I have two options.
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I could either be cautious and afraid, or second, be kind, thoughtful, and fearless.
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I choose the latter.
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Hopefully while still being open, fragile, and empathetic.
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Again, I strive to be like the main character of The Idiot by Dostoevsky.
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That's my New Year's resolution.
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Be kind and do difficult things.
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Difficult conversations, difficult research projects, and difficult entrepreneurial adventures.
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If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify,
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support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.
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And now, here's my conversation with Michael Malice.
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You're stealing my bed?
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I'll kill your family.
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That's not how a knock knock joke works.
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Knock knock, Michael.
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You don't do knock knock jokes with Russians because if we have a knock at the door, turn
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You got to sit quiet.
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We hope they go away.
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You don't do that back in the motherland.
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I can't even do it now.
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Leon me when you're not strong, Michael.
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Well, that will never happen.
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I stole elegantly, eloquently that joke from you.
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The lie detector term, that was a lie.
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Elegantly and eloquently.
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Yeah, you crossed it out on a sheet of paper.
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That means it's real.
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The reason I bring it up is because you had the guts, the brilliance to do a knock knock
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Not once, but three times with Alex Jones.
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I think it was like six.
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Maybe they started to sort of melt together in this beautiful art form that you've created,
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which is like these kind, loving knock knock jokes with Alex Jones.
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So you got the chance to meet him and talk to him twice with Tim Pool in a long form
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What was it like talking to Alex Jones, both on the deep philosophical intellectual level
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and staring the man in his eyes and doing a knock knock joke about Olive knock knock.
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Well, there's a lot to explain.
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Where do you start?
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I've been on his show Infowars a few times when I was researching my book, Then You Write.
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So I had had conversations with him before.
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One of the things that I appreciate about Alex is he is a lot more self aware than people
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think and has a good sense of humor.
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And I also like a good twist ending.
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So if you set people up and all these jokes are these kind of vapid, you know, all of
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you jokes and the last one's about building seven, they're not going to see that one coming
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nor will he see that one coming.
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I even had another one about Sandy Hook, which I didn't do on the air because he was being
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like a good sport, but that was the dagger that was kind of behind my back if necessary.
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But it was a good mechanism toward I like it when things work on several levels.
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It was also a good mechanism to keep kind of the conversation guarded and this every
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so often, this is kind of hitting the control, alt, delete and bring it down to a certain
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point of calmness.
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What about the love thing?
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I mean, you're saying that that was a buildup to the dagger, but it was also somehow really
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refreshing to get that little jolt, like that pause.
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You don't get that in conversations often.
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Like I'm a huge fan of Rogan and he'll have a three hour conversation, but at some point
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just pause and be like, I love you, man.
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Like it's in the cheesiest way possible because that seems to be, it somehow hits the hardest
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I don't know you didn't intend it that way, but with Alex Jones to sit there and to say,
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That was like, I just haven't never heard that before.
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And so it struck me as like, not just funny for what you're doing, but just like, whoa,
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we just took, cause conversations are all about like this ranting, especially with Alex
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Jones, just like ranting about this or that, this part of the world, like, can you believe
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That kind of thing.
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But like to pause and be like, this is awesome.
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I don't know if you felt that way, but.
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Oh, I definitely felt that way.
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So it was actually very fun.
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I'll give you the backstory of how that happened.
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It was silly cause Tim calls me up and there's this expression in marketing, don't go past
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You're gonna buy someone a car and like, it's got this feature, this feature and that feature.
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And they're like, you know what?
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I'm going to buy the car.
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If you keep talking, you can only make them lose the sale.
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You just get them to sign and get, get out of Dodge.
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So Tim calls me up and he goes, okay, here's what we're thinking.
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This is top secret.
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Alex is going to be on the show.
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We want you on as well.
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And I've never said yes to anything as quickly in my life.
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And then he keeps talking and I'm like, Tim, this, you don't have to sell it.
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I interrupted him.
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I go, you don't have to sell it.
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Why you, by the way?
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I think because I am kind of an agent of chaos and Alex is in his own way, an agent of chaos.
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And what is, provides an opportunity in this kind of news media space that you and I travel
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in, it's the kind of things where none of us three, you know, as we said on the show,
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knew what it would be like.
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If you, you know, to certain, within certain parameters, what, you know, Megyn Kelly or
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Wolf Blitzer or any of these corporate figures are going to be like in a conversation to
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some extent, none of us had any idea.
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I knew they didn't know I was bringing in knocking up jokes.
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So that was kind of what was so exciting.
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I said at one point, I'm kind of envious of the audience because this is, there's so many
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exciting things that are happening and that the internet and podcasting provides people
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an opportunity to do that.
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That, that was the greatest pairing with Alex Jones that I've ever seen by far.
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So like, so I immediately knew now this isn't a knock on Tim, but I don't even know if Tim
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Tim was not prepared.
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How could he be prepared?
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Well, so I mean, I don't know if Tim is used to that.
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I think Joe Rogan is more equipped, prepared for the chaos, just the years he's been in
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Like I immediately thought this is the right pairing for Joe Rogan because Alex Jones has
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been on Joe Rogan a few times, three times.
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My favorite so far was with Tim Dillon, but Tim was clearly, Tim Dillon was also kind
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of a genius in his own right, but he was kind of a fan and he was stepping away.
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He was almost like in awe of Alex Jones where you were both, you were in awe of the experience
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that's being created and at the same time fearlessly just trolling the situation.
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I mean, to do a knock, knock joke, to stop, I mean, that just shows that you're in control
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of the experience.
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No, you're like riding the experience.
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That immediately was like, this needs to be on Rogan.
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So I hope that happens as well.
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You're on your own, of course, on Rogan, but just you, that's an experience.
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That's the, whatever, this gotta be a good name for it.
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Like Jimi Hendrix Experience, there's the Michael and Alex.
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Because that was a band.
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Well, I don't know how many years you can restart the experience.
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Because I feel sorry to interrupt you, I feel a very big responsibility, especially in 2020
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to provide fun and something cool and something unique that hasn't been done before for the
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I think this has been a very rough year on our audiences psychologically and in other
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aspects of their lives.
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So I feel if I'm going to be there, I'm going to put on a show and it's also going to be
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great because it also alienates the people you don't want.
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So there's a lot of people who sit there and be like, oh, he's telling knock, people who
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are too cool for school, where they're like, oh, he's telling knock, knock jokes.
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If you have an issue with having eaten cotton candy or doing a puzzle with a kid or with
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that by yourself, that's on you.
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And it's something very, something I think is the enemy is cynicism and this idea that
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like, oh, this is too silly and we need that kind of childlike aspect in our lives.
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I think it's something we could use more of.
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It's very much an aspect of our media culture that to kind of have be condemnatory about
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that or to do it in a certain very corporate fake way.
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So it is something I encourage a lot, something I enjoy doing.
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And again, like with the first time I was on Tim, I had a propeller beanie on, you know,
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with the motorized and a lot of people were like, I can't take anyone seriously who dresses
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If you judge someone's ideas by how they appear instead of the ideas themselves, you're not
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someone I want on my team.
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Are we going to address the outfit you're wearing?
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We can address it, sure.
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You know, for those who are colorblind, Michael's wearing the, or just listening to this, Michael's
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wearing the exact opposite, the universe from another dimension outfit, which is a white
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suit and black shirt.
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You just see the next two looks I've planned.
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Yeah, they're great.
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Well, obviously this relationship's going to end today.
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I'll put them on Insta.
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Is there some deep philosophy to the humor?
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Is this goes to our trolling discussion?
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Is there some, is there like chapters to this genius or is this just what makes you smile
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Well, I mean, I think you're honestly, in this case, using the word genius a little
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I don't think this is particularly genius, but I do think it is fun.
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I think the bigger my audience has gotten and the more I actually communicate with,
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you know, fans, I do feel it kind of kicks in these paternal maternal instincts, which
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is very, very odd.
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I did not expect to have them.
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I'm the dad and the mom.
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I remember, and it may have been similar for you, I'm curious to hear it.
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For young, smart, like ambitious men, like 24 to 27 for me was a very rough period because
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that's the window where a lot of people get married and they kind of check out.
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And if you're very much kind of finding your own road, you don't know what's happening.
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No one's in a position to really guide you or help you.
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It's a very tough window.
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And what I'm finding now is having these kids who are in that position, but now instead
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of them stumbling along, for some of them, I'm the one who could be like, no, no, no,
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It's everybody else.
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And to be able to give them that semblance of feeling seen, to use a cliched expression,
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to feel normal and that, no, no, you're the heroes here.
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They're the background noise.
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It's just really very flattering and humbling to be in that position.
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You have many minds, right?
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There's the thoughtful kind, Michael, there's like, I'm going to burn down the powerful.
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And then there's like, I'm going to have this just lighthearted trolling of the world, which
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and which of those are most important to the 27 demographic?
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I think it is the combination.
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It's like if you're making a meal, chicken Kiev, you need the chicken, you need the ham,
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you need the butter sauce.
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Because I think people, when you're young, you need to see someone who's fought the fight
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for you and who's won.
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So it's very easy to be defeatist.
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So this is what winning looks like.
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This is most assuredly what winning does not look like.
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But in my normal clothes, a little bit more.
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This is a good time to mention that clothes wise, you're wearing sheath underwear.
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And people should buy sheath underwear.
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Use code Malice20.
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If you go to sheathunderwear.com, use promo code Malice20.
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What I love about why I'm glad to promote the product and wear it, it's the most comfortable
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underwear I've ever worn.
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And you have a separate pouch for both parts of your genitals.
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That's what I thought there was like a punchline coming.
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No, it's a very nice aspect of the product.
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But I think what here's something else just goes back to what we're just talking about.
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There are so many and this is going to segue into this.
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There are so many small companies who've been devastated this year.
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We have not seen a sustained attack on mom and pop shops like we've seen in 2020, who
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are innovators and making something happen.
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And when you're just like one dude who's producing a product, they're a sponsor of mine.
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I'm happy to, first of all, it's funny that I'm pitching underwear, but it's also something
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And also you said small business.
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It's microscopic, like a thimble.
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So this isn't a sponsor of mine, but this is a good segue.
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So this is, Russians, we celebrate New Year's, it's Novomgorodom.
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We have Dmitry, he comes down, puts a present under your pillow.
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So this is a company called J.L. Lawson.
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He's a fan of yours.
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He's a metal worker.
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And he said, can I give you something to give to Lex?
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I have one of his worry coins.
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I'll tell you what it is.
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He's not a sponsor.
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This is not, I'm not getting paid for this.
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So what a worry coin is, I carry it around in my butt.
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If you have raw denim, it's great because it brings you fades.
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So you carry it around with you all the time.
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It says worrying is like paying a debt you don't owe, right?
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And I carry this around and allow it to spend like a year.
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Next time you're worrying, and this is good advice if you don't have a worry coin.
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Go think about 10 years ago and what you were worried about then.
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And then think about, did any of those things pan out?
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And some of them did, but you were able to handle it.
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And that's a good way to maintain perspective.
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So J.L. Lawson is the company.
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He sent me this present.
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I said, let me give it to Lex on air.
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So I have to open it up now?
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J.L. Lawson and co.
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Two Lex from Anthony.
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And I said, make something mathematical for Lex.
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So I don't even know what's in there.
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You don't know what's in there?
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And it got through his TSA.
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Just like this episode.
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Make sure you unwrap it close to the mic because it drives you for crazy.
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That's really the best part.
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Is this what an unboxing video looks like?
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This conversation is going to be a big hit on the internet.
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With the unboxing community.
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I need to have an excited look on my face to make sure that the reaction video, it should
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be an unboxing and a reaction video.
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Lex Freeman reacts.
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It's just a series of boxes.
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Lex big fan since hearing you on Rogan months ago.
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Most of your guests are over my head, but still enjoyable.
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Like this episode, Michael was kind enough to want to share my work with you.
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Keep doing what you do.
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There's a lot in there.
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Show it to the camera and then make sure you look excited or not or disappointed.
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This is a worry coin.
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Like I was showing you.
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So you hold it in your hand and when you can do this with your thumb, if people are, have
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anxiety or whatever.
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Oh, there's a lot of cool stuff in here.
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Oh, see, yeah, that's the math stuff.
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That's really awesome.
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This is really cool.
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Wait, you got a big one laying there too.
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That's what she said.
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I'm telling you last time you offended me saying I don't have humor.
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The spin tray micro brass and copper bronze.
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By the way, the packaging is epic.
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I think that's his top.
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Yeah, you spin it in there and it's the two different bronze and copper.
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I think he's the only one who makes these machined tops and then they sit in here, I
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Yeah, but you could spin them in that section.
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Where's the where's the worry thing?
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Here's the worry coin.
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Anyway, I wasn't listening.
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What were you worried about 10 years ago?
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10 years ago, 2010.
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What would I have been worried about then?
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That's not a worry.
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What was the North Korea book?
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That came out in 2014.
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I went there in 2012, came out in January 2014.
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It still pays my rent with the royalties.
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The North Korea book?
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See, this is why it's so much better.
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I gotta talk to you about self publishing because you brought that up.
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I'm doing the next books also going to be self published.
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Can we talk about self publishing?
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What's the whole idea of publishing?
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Like having a publisher and an agent because there's a bunch of people have been reaching
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out to me trying to get me to write a book, which is ridiculous.
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Because people who are brilliant folks like you, like Jordan Peterson, that I think have
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a lot of knowledge to share with the world.
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I think what I feel I can contribute to the world in terms of impact is to build something.
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Meaning like engineering stuff.
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A book has to be engineered and I'm not using that loosely.
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You have to engineer a book.
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What I mean is like literally a product with programming and artificial intelligence.
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I want to build a company.
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Because I have a few ideas that I feel I'm equipped and it has to do with your intuition
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about the way you can build a better world.
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Like, what can you add to the world that's a positive thing?
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And for me, I feel like the maximal thing I can add to the world is at least to attempt
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to build products that would add more love in the world.
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And like, so I want to focus on that.
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The danger of the book for me, or any kind of writing, and even this podcast is a little
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bit dangerous for me, is like, it's fun.
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It's like it takes you into this place where you start thinking about the world.
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You start enjoying and playing with ideas.
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And like, just your book on a Dear Reader, but also the new write.
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Like clearly you and I probably think similarly in the sense that you did a lot of work.
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This next book is killing me.
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As you mentioned, often it's clear, like on your YouTube channel, which I'm a fan of,
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you often, it just comes out like you mentioned all of these books that you're reading.
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It just comes through you that you're suffering through this and it changes you.
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And it's clear that you're thinking deeply about the world because of this book.
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And I feel like if you do that, that's like when I first came to this country, I read
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the book The Giver.
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I need to read it again.
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It's like the red pill thing is it changes you in where you can never be the same person
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I feel about a book in that same way.
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The moment you write a book, of course it depends on the book.
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I could also just write like in my field, a very technical book.
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No, that's a terrible idea.
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That doesn't really change you.
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That's just like sharing information.
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But like something where you're like, how do I think about this world?
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Can you just leave that behind you?
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Dude, it's being pregnant.
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It never escapes your brain.
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You're absolutely right.
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It does seem to change you.
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The reason I bring that up is because there's this whole industry of people that seem to
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not really contribute much to the publication process, but they make themselves seem necessary
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for like, if you want to be in the New York Times bestseller list kind of thing, but also
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just being like reputable, which I'm allergic to that whole concept.
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But do you think it's possible to be on the New York Times bestseller list and be a reputable
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author and still be self published?
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Not what you would want to do.
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Like people like Mark Sisson, I think is his name.
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He wrote like the Primal Blueprints.
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So like if I'm getting the names correct, he's the first paleo guy, right?
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So he self published it.
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It sold gangbusters.
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But that would be on their health chart, I believe.
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And it's a little bit of a different situation.
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You would be reaching much more for the mainstream.
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You'd be giving up a lot if you go through a publisher, especially financially.
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But yeah, you are not going to have the cred because the publishing is a cartel.
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The New York Times is part of this cartel.
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And if you don't publish within this cartel, they will do what they can, as any cartel
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has to, by necessity of being cartel, to pretend you don't exist.
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So I was, I think, the first one to have an hour on BookTV for Dear Reader because that
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was a Kickstarter book.
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But this is something that people would have to be aware of.
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So you would be giving up a lot.
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But you'd also be giving a lot to work with a publisher because you're losing like a year
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and a half of your life because they're glacial and they don't care.
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Well, that's my problem.
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It's not the money.
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I mean, the money is whatever percent they take, 10, 20, 30, 50%.
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They're taking a huge chunk.
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So if I sell a book through St. Martin's, it's a dollar.
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If I sell a book through Amazon, which is Dear Reader, that's $6.
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So that's what, 87%, it's something crazy.
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But for me, what bothers me isn't the money that, for me personally, for me, what bothers
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me is incompetence.
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Like whenever I go to the DMV or something like that.
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Can I interrupt you?
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Let's talk incompetence.
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When a new write comes out last year, I get on Rogan, get on Ruben.
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I call them and I said, I got on these shows.
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Is there money in the budget for travel?
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And they say, we don't have that budget.
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By the way, you got on those shows with no help from them.
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Oh yeah, that's not even a question.
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The reason they would want you to do a book is because they know you could get...
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The only reason people get book deals nowadays, literally, is because they know that person
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can market their own book.
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That's the only way.
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And I got on Ruben, I got on Rogan, and they go and have the money for the budget for travel,
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They can do Skype.
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They told me this in writing.
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And I'm like, okay.
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And they can financially cover Skype.
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No, but it's like, hey Joe, yeah, we don't have the budget, but you're going to do Skype.
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There is, another friend of mine was on a show on CNBC with Nassim Taleb, and they said
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Nassim wants a copy of the book.
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And they're like, oh yeah, it's like four o clock on Friday, so we're closed.
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So, and he's like, he went there, picked it up, and walked it the two blocks.
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So there is, it's almost cartoonish, and it's not incompetence.
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It's something almost, you can't really believe that, I've had two friends who have been literally
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rendered suicidal because this was such a huge opportunity for them.
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And it was like watching their kid get beaten in front of them, and I had to talk them off
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So it's, people do not appreciate how bad, here's another example.
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The apathy of bureaucracy, something like that.
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I did this book, Concierge Confidential.
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There's a typo in the first chapter, it ends with, I'm about to, TOO, they didn't fix it
link |
for the paperback.
link |
It's just like, well, okay, yeah, great book by the way, it got, NPR gave it one of the
link |
books of the year, so that was good.
link |
So why participate in this?
link |
Because otherwise, New York Times is going to pretend you don't exist.
link |
Getting booked on some shows might be more difficult.
link |
Although I think that's collapsing in real time.
link |
You're not going to get reviewed necessarily on places like PW, or some others.
link |
So the new book you're working on, do you have a title yet?
link |
Are you self publishing that?
link |
Oh yeah, for sure.
link |
And what's the thinking behind that?
link |
Just because you already have a huge following and a big platform and...
link |
It's six times the cash.
link |
If I finish the book in December, I could have it out in February.
link |
If I finish the book in December with the publisher, it's going to be out in December
link |
at the earliest, 2021.
link |
Why am I giving up 10 months of my life?
link |
Well, this is the big one.
link |
Do you have any leverage?
link |
Like do authors have leverage to say, F you?
link |
Can you just say, what do you mean?
link |
Meaning like, I want to release this book in two months.
link |
I mean, you'll have a contract and then your agent can fight it, but they don't have the
link |
capacity to rush things through.
link |
I guess if the, cause I've heard like big authors, I don't know, Sam Harris, all those
link |
folks talk about like, they've accepted it actually.
link |
They've accepted it.
link |
They're like, yeah, it takes a long time to...
link |
I'm not accepting it.
link |
But you're kind of implying that a human being like me should, like...
link |
I'm saying these are your options.
link |
So I just, I just hate it.
link |
I hate the waiting because it's incompetence.
link |
It's not the, it's not necessarily the wait.
link |
If I knew it wasn't, you know, if it was the kind of people that are up at 2 a.m. at night
link |
on a Friday and they love what you're doing and they're helping create something special.
link |
That's the sense I get with some of the Netflix folks, for example, that work with people.
link |
I just, I don't know anything about this world, but you get like Netflix folks who, who help
link |
You could tell that they're obsessed with those shows.
link |
You're not going to get that publishing.
link |
If you hand, like I handed the book in, I think it was July, I didn't hear anything from
link |
my editor until December.
link |
Well, can we actually talk about the suffering, the darkest parts of writing a book?
link |
So the, let's go to the full Michael Malice, Stephen King mode of what are the darkest
link |
moments of writing this book and what is it maybe start, the white pill?
link |
What's the hope and what are your darkest moments around writing this book?
link |
So people are familiar with the red pill and the blue pill, the red, they're from the Matrix.
link |
The red pill is the idea that what is presented as fact by the corporate press entertainment
link |
industry is in fact a carefully constructed narrative designed to keep some very unpleasant
link |
people in power and everyone else under control.
link |
And I guess one of my expressions is you take one red pill, not the whole bottle because
link |
at a certain point you think everything's lie and then you're kind of no capacity for
link |
distinguishing truths.
link |
You're full of good one liners.
link |
I'm full of something that's for sure.
link |
And what I saw in this space is a lot of these red pill people got very disheartened and
link |
And one of my big heroes is Albert Camus and he said the worst thing is cynicism.
link |
And that's something called the black pill, which is the idea that, you know, it's all,
link |
it's just we're waiting for the end.
link |
And I don't see it that way at all.
link |
And I'm like, all right, I have to address this.
link |
And not just with some kind of cheerleading, everything's going to be great guys.
link |
Here is why I am positive.
link |
And not that I'm positive the good guys are going to win, but I'm positive that good guys
link |
And that's all you need.
link |
Because if your God forbid kid is kidnapped and there's a 10% chance that you can save
link |
them, you're not going to be like, well, I don't like those odds.
link |
This is your country.
link |
This is your values.
link |
This is your family.
link |
And I think it's much more than 10%.
link |
And even if you lose, you will take pride in that you did everything in your power to
link |
Is there a good definition of good guys?
link |
In the sense that.
link |
The ones who wear white.
link |
There's layers to this.
link |
You're like modern day Shakespeare.
link |
Is there a danger in thinking Adolf Hitler was probably pretty confident that he led
link |
a group of good guys?
link |
Listen, if Hitler did anything wrong, why isn't he in jail?
link |
My Czech friend thought of that joke.
link |
He actually says in his accent, he goes, if Hitler's so bad, why isn't he in the jail?
link |
That's a good point.
link |
He's probably still alive.
link |
Two of the three people listening to this are very upset right now.
link |
What were you even talking about?
link |
Oh, how do you, how do you know the, what is good?
link |
There's lots of standards of good, but if you're for me to be a good guy is if you want
link |
to leave the world a little bit better than you found it, that to me is the definition
link |
And I think there are many people that that's not their motivation at all.
link |
It's about your motivation.
link |
Well, it's also about if your motivation is at all correlated to reality.
link |
No one thinks we're the bad guys.
link |
But are you taking steps to check your motivations and also take a certain amount of humility
link |
because if you're going to start interfering with other people's lives, you really better
link |
be sure you know what you're talking about.
link |
The control of others, if you do have centralized control or then you kind of, you become a
link |
leader of a group, you better know, you better do so humbly and cautiously.
link |
And also have steam valves, right?
link |
So if in case things go wrong, let's have, I'm sure this is a lot happening with AI,
link |
whatever work with computers, like, okay, if something goes wrong here, how do we have
link |
a workaround to make sure it doesn't cause everything to collapse?
link |
The going wrong thing.
link |
I mean, the whole, the feedback mechanism.
link |
Like, I wonder if people in Congress think that things are really wrong.
link |
It's working for them.
link |
Because I'd like to believe that the people that at least when they got into politics
link |
actually wanted, some of it is ego, but some of it is like wanting to be the kind of person
link |
that builds a better world.
link |
I also think it's diverse.
link |
Some of who are going to have different motivations than others.
link |
But like once you're in the system and trying to build a better world, how do you know that's
link |
Like, how do you take the basic feedback mechanisms and like, and actually productively change?
link |
I mean, that's what it means to be a good guy is like, hmm, something is wrong here.
link |
And that's why I like the Elon Musk, like think from first principles, like, wait, wait,
link |
Let's ask the big question.
link |
Like, can this be, one, is this working at all?
link |
Like the way we're solving this particular problem of government, is this working at
link |
And then like stepping away and saying like, as opposed to modifying this bill or that
link |
bill or like this little strategy, like increase the tax by this much or decrease the tax by
link |
this much, like, why do we have a democracy at all?
link |
Or why do we have any kind of representative democracy?
link |
Shouldn't it be a pure democracy?
link |
Or why do we have states, like representation of states and federal government and so on?
link |
Why do we have this kind of separation of powers?
link |
Is this different?
link |
Why don't we have term limits or not like big things?
link |
Like how do you actually make that happen?
link |
And is that what it means to be a good guy?
link |
It's like taking big revolutionary steps as opposed to incremental steps.
link |
Well, I don't know that you could be a politician to be a good guy, to be honest.
link |
And let me give you a counter example of someone who you could tell is not being a good guy.
link |
Joe Biden said he regards the Iraq wars a mistake.
link |
You and I have made mistakes in our lives, I'm sure.
link |
None of our mistakes have caused tens of thousands of people to die.
link |
If I were a chef, let's take it out of politics.
link |
And in my restaurant, somehow, accidentally, someone ate something and they died.
link |
A, I would feel horrible.
link |
But more importantly, I would be like, we need to look through the system and figure
link |
out how it got to the point where someone lost their life.
link |
Because that can never happen again.
link |
And we need to figure out step by step.
link |
I'm not a gun person, but there's like this checklist of like, if you're holding a gun,
link |
there's five things to do.
link |
And if you get too wrong, it's like assume every gun is loaded, only pointed at something
link |
that you want to kill.
link |
And there's like three other things.
link |
And it's like to make sure that nothing goes wrong.
link |
So if I'm that chef, and I would have to not only feel guilt, but take preventative action
link |
to make sure this has no possibility of happening again.
link |
If you look at the staff he's putting in, it's the same warmongers that would have advised
link |
him to get into the Iraq war on the first time.
link |
That is to me is not a good guy.
link |
That to me is someone who does not feel remorse for their responsibility in killing not only
link |
many Americans, but some of us think that, you know, dead Iraqis isn't necessarily ideal
link |
Okay, let's talk a bit about war.
link |
Maybe you can also correct me on something.
link |
The first time I found myself into Barack Obama was, I don't know how many years ago
link |
this was, but when I maybe heard a speech of his about him speaking out against the
link |
And him, I think it's on record saying he was against the war before it was happening.
link |
But he wasn't in Senate at the time, so it was very easy for him to say this.
link |
But see, like people say that, people say that.
link |
People say like it was easy and it was some people say it's like strategically the wise
link |
thing to do given some kind of calculus, whatever.
link |
But I, to this day give him, that's the reason I've always given him props in my mind.
link |
Like this is a man of character, like he makes, I also personally really value great speeches.
link |
I think speeches are really important for leaders because they inspire the world.
link |
It's like one of the most best things you can contribute to the world is great, like
link |
through intellect, mold ideas in a way that's communicable to like a huge number of people.
link |
Yeah, it's better to persuade than to force in every instance.
link |
That's where I disagree with Chomsky said, like if you're, Chomsky's whole idea was that
link |
like if you're really eloquent speaker, that means your ideas aren't that good.
link |
So I think that's a way for him to describe like I speak in a very boring way.
link |
Maybe that's a pitch for this podcast.
link |
I speak boring so that the ideas are the things you value and it's also useful to go to sleep.
link |
But that's why I really liked Obama throughout his life and still do.
link |
But when I first like saw this is for some reason you can disagree, I thought he's a
link |
It's when most politicians, most people who are trying to calculate and rise in power,
link |
I think were for the war or too afraid to be against the war.
link |
That's why I liked Bernie Sanders and that's why I liked like in the early days Obama for
link |
speaking out against the war and not like in this weird activist way.
link |
Not weird, but not saying I'm an activist, but like just saying the common sense thing
link |
and being brave enough to say the common sense thing without like having a big sign and saying
link |
I'm going to be the antiwar candidate or something like that, but just saying this is not a good
link |
And I think it's for those of us who are old enough to remember, it's pretty despicable
link |
what happened with Tulsi in 2020.
link |
She was the biggest antiwar candidate and she was marginalized within her own party,
link |
which I guess you can make sense.
link |
She's just a congresswoman from Hawaii.
link |
But the corporate press did everything in their power to diminish her and pretend she
link |
And for those of us who remember where 12 years prior, when George W. Bush had the Republican
link |
National Convention in New York and it was the biggest protest in history and the Iraq
link |
war led to democratic landslides in 2006 and 2008, to have that completely not part of
link |
the Democratic Party in 2020 is both shocking and reprehensible.
link |
Hey, Michael, you don't have to say, hey, Michael, you just say knock, knock, okay.
link |
What did the volcano say to his true love?
link |
These jokes are better when you know how to speak English.
link |
It was actually in Russian, I did Google translate, okay.
link |
Back to your book, In the Suffering, you somehow turned it positive.
link |
And as one who's wearing, who's the representative of the black pill in this conversation, what
link |
are some of the darker moments?
link |
What are some of the hardest challenges of putting together this book, the white pill?
link |
Content, content, content.
link |
So if I'm having a page in about Reagan taking on Gerald Ford in the 1976 presidential primaries,
link |
I'm going to have to read like 20.
link |
So it's the thing like if there'll be some times I'll remember some quote somewhere and
link |
then I have to spend an hour trying to find it because I want it to be as dense with information
link |
Like how do you structure the main philosophical ideas you want to convey?
link |
Is that already planned out?
link |
No, the book changed entirely from its conception.
link |
So my buddy Ryan Holiday had a series of books, still does, where he takes the ideas of the
link |
Stoics and he applies them to contemporary terms.
link |
He has this whole cottage industry that he's doing very well with.
link |
And I'd asked him years ago if I could do that with Camus and he's like, sure, go for
link |
And I was going to rework Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus.
link |
And I read it recently, reread it, and this wasn't the book I remembered at all.
link |
And I'm like, okay, I'm going to write the book that I remembered.
link |
But the more I was writing it, one of the things I always yell at conservatives about,
link |
there's a long list, is they don't talk about the great victory of conservatism, which was
link |
the winning of the Cold War without firing a shot.
link |
And I said, you can't expect the New York Times to tell this story because the blood
link |
is on their hands.
link |
And I'm like, well, Michael, instead of complaining about it, why don't you do it?
link |
Why don't you talk?
link |
That is a great example of the good guys winning over the bad guys.
link |
And that's become, A, the victory is beautiful.
link |
But also pointing out to people, when people are like, oh, things are worse than they've
link |
ever been, they don't appreciate how bad things were in the 30s, what Stalin was doing overseas
link |
and how people in the West were advocating to bring that here.
link |
So that's kind of pointing out how bad things were and how good they became.
link |
And you don't have to be a Republican or conservative to be delighted at the collapse of totalitarianism
link |
and the peaceful liberation of half the world.
link |
So that's a picture of the good guys winning.
link |
Well, how does that connect to Sisyphus and maybe to speak deeper to life and whatever
link |
the hell this thing is, which is what I remember the myth of Sisyphus being about.
link |
So where does the threat of Camus sort of lie in the work that you're doing?
link |
So the myth of Sisyphus, which I had remembered incorrectly, is actually just a five to seven
link |
page coda to the whole book at the very end.
link |
You only need to read that little essay called The Myth of Sisyphus.
link |
The broader work is about Camus's concept of the absurd and the absurd man within literature.
link |
And it's just like, I don't really care about the character in Dostoevsky and all this other
link |
stuff that you're talking about.
link |
It's of no relevance.
link |
But the myth of Sisyphus, the myth itself, not the book or the essay of his, is this
link |
Greek character and Sisyphus is forced in hell to roll a rock up a hill for eternity.
link |
At the very last moment, the rock falls away.
link |
And Camus's takeaway from the story is that we must imagine Sisyphus happy.
link |
And there's several interpretations of this, but one is once you accept that you are living
link |
an absurdist existence, once you own your reality, it loses its bite.
link |
And you can start with that as your kind of baseline.
link |
And bite is suffering.
link |
So I think when people look at how much ridiculousness is happening in America and it's escalating,
link |
you can either think, oh, all is lost.
link |
And I think you and I have lived our lives like this.
link |
You can live life more like a surfer, whereas you're never going to control the ocean.
link |
But you can sure enjoy that ride and stop.
link |
If you're trying to control the waves, yeah, you're done.
link |
But if you're like, all right, I've got my board, I'm going to see where this takes me.
link |
Surfing from what I understand is a pretty fun activity.
link |
And also sometimes dangerous, but you'd have to ask Tulsi about that.
link |
So we were offline talking about Stalin and the evils of the Soviet regime.
link |
One of the things I mentioned, I watched the movie, Mr. Jones, but it's about the 1930s,
link |
all the more the, what would you say, the torture of the Ukrainian people by Stalin.
link |
One interesting thing to me that I'd love to hear your opinion about is the role of
link |
journalism in all of this and also about 1930s Germany.
link |
So what's the role of journalists and intellectuals in a time when trouble is brewing.
link |
But it requires a really sort of brave and deep thinking to understand that trouble is
link |
Like if you were a journalist or if you were just like an intellectual, a thinker, but
link |
also a voice in the space of public discourse, what would you do in 1930s about Stalin, about
link |
how the more, and what would you do about Nazi Germany in 1937, 1938?
link |
So that's really funny that you asked that because currently how the book is structured,
link |
it's like books often follow a three act structure, right?
link |
So act three is the 80s, act one is the 30s, and act two is going to be like, all right,
link |
let's suppose you were in the 30s.
link |
Are you just going to give up?
link |
Are you just going to be like, well, we're screwed?
link |
And you'd be right to say things are going to be very bad for a long time.
link |
Or are you going to be one of those few who are like, we're going to do something about
link |
this and we're going to go down swinging.
link |
There are two books I can recommend, which are just masterpieces that are written by
link |
women that just are historians that are just superb.
link |
There's a book called Beyond Belief by Deborah Lipschdott.
link |
She talks about the rise of Nazi Germany as seen through the press.
link |
And what was amazing, and she does a great job empathizing with the press and understand
link |
their perspective, is we remember, and Chamberlain gets a bad rap, Neville Chamberlain for kind
link |
of appeasing Hitler, because not that long ago they had the Great War, they had World
link |
War I, and they had the carnage that the earth had never seen before.
link |
And when you had people made out of meat, meeting industrial machines, and plastic surgery
link |
was invented as a consequence of this, they're coming back mangled and disfigured.
link |
And this was a world where the Kaiser was the most evil person ever lived.
link |
And we all had the Western propaganda about the Hun and all the rapes and all this barbarism
link |
and blah, blah, blah.
link |
So not that long later, when you're hearing all this propaganda, which was factual, about
link |
Hitler, it's like, we heard this, we heard this 20 years ago.
link |
This was all lies.
link |
And she has all the quotes from the different agencies and how they addressed it.
link |
Plus they had very limited information.
link |
It's not like Nazi Germany was an open society where reporters can walk around and they were
link |
under a lot of pressure as well in those areas.
link |
And Hitler himself was pretty good at, he let some stuff slip, but usually he made it
link |
seem like he wants peace.
link |
He wants world peace.
link |
They were making the argument that because all these Jews were being beaten up on the
link |
street, this proved, this was the hot take of the day, that Hitler was weak because since
link |
Hitler's a statesman and he can't control these hooligans, that shows his control and
link |
power is tenuous and this is all going to go away.
link |
By the way, Hitler thought that too.
link |
He was kind of afraid of the branchers, whatever, he was afraid of these hooligans a little
link |
They were useful to him, but at a certain point, yeah, they can get in the way.
link |
That's why he wanted to get control of the military, the army, their regiment.
link |
If you want to take over the world, you can't do it with hooligans.
link |
You have to do it with an actual army.
link |
And then you had Kristallnacht, which was a nationwide pogrom, and then all the news
link |
agencies universally were like, oh, crap, we got this wrong, and the condemnation was universal.
link |
So that book traces the West's reaction to what's going on there and including the reaction
link |
to the insipid Holocaust as people being, you know, what they knew, when did they know.
link |
There was not ambiguity about people.
link |
I think there's this myth that she dispels that they didn't know the Holocaust was happening
link |
or they didn't care.
link |
They were aware, but they were already at war with Nazi Germany, like what literally
link |
what else could they do at that point, you know, to rescue all these Jews.
link |
So that's a superb book.
link |
And Ann Applebaum, I think the book is called Red Famine, came out fairly recently.
link |
And she brings the receipts.
link |
And she's a, you know, this is something I really hate with the binary thinkers, where
link |
the people think, oh, you know, if you're a Democrat, you're basically a communist,
link |
they call Joe Biden a Marxist.
link |
It's just like, you know, she's a hard lefty, she's, you know, has TDS.
link |
But this book just systemically lays out what Stalin did.
link |
By the way, I'm triggered by the binary thinkers.
link |
And for those who don't know, TDS 0011 is a trauma derangement syndrome.
link |
So they, you know, forced the starvation in this entire population.
link |
And it's not only that, it's like they knew if you weren't starving by looking at you,
link |
you were hiding food.
link |
So they'd come back to your house at night and break your fingers in the door, or take,
link |
burn down your house.
link |
And now you're on the street without food because you lied, because this is the people's
link |
You're a kulak, you're a landowner.
link |
And very quickly, a kulak, which meant like peasant landowner, became anyone who had a
link |
And this was systemic and ongoing.
link |
And many people in the press did not believe it.
link |
There was a British journalist, I believe, who got out of the train, Ukraine, like one
link |
town earlier and walked and he described all this.
link |
And he was mocked and derided.
link |
And this is just anti Russian propaganda.
link |
Because at the time, in the 30s, this was socialism had come to fruition.
link |
This was a noble experiment.
link |
I'd seen the future and it works, as I think Sidney Webb was the guy who said that.
link |
And the premise was, let's see what happens.
link |
We've never tried something like that.
link |
And they were perfectly happy to have this experiment happen overseas at the price of
link |
the Russian people.
link |
Because it's like, you know what, maybe this will be paradise on earth.
link |
And I address this in my book as well.
link |
This superb essay, I think, by Eugene Genovese.
link |
And he talks about the question.
link |
The question being, what did you know?
link |
And when did you know it?
link |
What did you know about the concentration camps?
link |
What did you know about the starvation?
link |
What did you know about children being taught at school to turn in their parents for having
link |
And his conclusion is, we all knew.
link |
And we all knew from the beginning, every bit of it.
link |
And we didn't care.
link |
Because we were more interested in promoting this ideology.
link |
So when people are kind of thinking the worst thing on earth is like Robert E. Lee statue
link |
being taken down to Washington, DC.
link |
We were being told, and especially in a much more limited news information world where
link |
now you have literally anyone can have a Twitter, but how many outlets were there, that this
link |
is, we're backwards, they're the future, they're scientific.
link |
We have the vagaries of the market, which led to the Great Depression.
link |
And when you see what was being put over on the American public at the time, anyone who
link |
thinks things are as bad now as they've ever been is simply delusional or ignorant.
link |
Yeah, I would say just as a small aside, that's why reading, as I'm almost done with The Rise
link |
and Fall of the Third Reich, it's a refreshes the, resets the palette of your understanding
link |
what is good and evil in the world that I think is really useful now.
link |
What helps me be really positive and almost naive on Twitter and in the world is by just
link |
studying history and comparing it to how amazing things are today.
link |
But in that time, what would you do?
link |
What does a brave mind do?
link |
And not just acts of bravery, but how do you be effective in that?
link |
That's something I often think about.
link |
It's easy to be an activist in terms of just saying stuff.
link |
It's hard to be effective at your activism.
link |
One of the big questions historians have constantly is how did this happen?
link |
A, to make sure it doesn't happen again, but this is Germany.
link |
This is not some kind of weirdo cult nation.
link |
They're very advanced, very in the land of poets and philosophers.
link |
How did it get to that point that they're just shooting children and everyone's cheering
link |
Specifically on the anti Semitism and the Holocaust.
link |
But just the totalitarianism, the cult of Hitler and just this whole kind of thing.
link |
This is starting to drop, but there's two sides.
link |
I don't know if you want to separate them.
link |
One is the totalitarianism and the entirety of the Nazi regime.
link |
And then there's the Holocaust, which is going, I would say, very specifically, as I think
link |
you're about to describe, is targeting Jews very much so.
link |
I don't know if you see those as two separate things.
link |
I think they're very interconnected.
link |
But I think if you look at it, everyone thinks that they'd be the ones putting up Anne Frank.
link |
But if you look at the numbers, they'd be the ones calling the Stasi on her or whoever
link |
the people were at the time, and not the Stasi, obviously, and patting themselves on the back
link |
So sorry to pause on that.
link |
That's a really important thing.
link |
If you're listening to this, and you were in Germany at the time, you would have likely
link |
been willing to commit or at least keep a blind eye to the violence against Jews.
link |
You have to really sit with that idea that you would have been somebody who just sees
link |
this and is not bothered by it, and also very likely kind of understand this as a necessary
link |
evil or even a necessary good.
link |
And I think people think they would be the abolitionists or marching on Selma.
link |
The numbers don't add up to that at all.
link |
And I think the question would be like, what social...
link |
My friend was on Tinder, my friend Matt, who's a great dude.
link |
And the question was, what's the most controversial opinion you have?
link |
And the girl wrote, I hate Trump.
link |
And what people perceive themselves as being courageous in saying and doing, and what is
link |
the actual social costs of you saying or doing this are two very disconnected things.
link |
And we're also trained by corporate media to have completely vapid, uninteresting, banal
link |
ideas and yet regard ourselves as revolutionaries.
link |
There are people who still in New York will take pride because they have a gay friend.
link |
And it's like, first of all, who cares?
link |
But second of all, you are not a hero.
link |
And that person is not your prop, by the way.
link |
That's another big problem.
link |
Which is why I'd like to give Richard Wolff a shout out for being an intellectual who
link |
talks about communism.
link |
I think it takes kind of a heroic intellectual right now to speak about communism seriously.
link |
There's difficult waters to tread.
link |
Is that the expression?
link |
There's difficult paths to walk.
link |
I love watching a robot try to use idiom in a language he doesn't even know.
link |
I'm quite deeply hurt by the binary comment.
link |
Your feeling has gone from one to zero.
link |
My buffers have overflown.
link |
But there's difficult, I feel like communism is universally seen as a bad thing currently
link |
in intellectual circles.
link |
Or actually maybe some people disagree with that.
link |
People say far left, people are trying to, there's some people who argue the BLM movement
link |
is some kind of a Marxist.
link |
I don't really follow the deep logic in that, whatever.
link |
They said they were formed by Marxism, the founder, co founder.
link |
But stating that is different than...
link |
There's Marx the totalitarian, there's also Marx the revolutionary.
link |
I think they're talking more like we're revolutionaries, we're going to overthrow the status quo.
link |
But we can have that further discussion.
link |
But I just don't think they speak deeply about political systems and saying communism is
link |
going to be the righteous system.
link |
There's not a deep intellectual discourse is what I mean.
link |
But if you were to try to be on stage with the Jordan Peterson, to me the brave thing
link |
now, it would be to argue for communism.
link |
It'd be interesting to see.
link |
Not many people do it.
link |
I certainly wouldn't be willing to do it.
link |
I don't have enough...
link |
I don't, first of all, I don't believe it, but second of all, it's a very difficult argument
link |
to make because you will get so much fire, which is why I like Richard Wolff, he's one
link |
of the people who is quite rigorously showing that there's some good ideas within the system
link |
of communism, specifically saying that attacking more the negative sides of capitalism.
link |
Just saying that capitalism potentially is more dangerous than communism.
link |
I mean, I disagree with that, but I think it's a...
link |
I love how something is like we've got a body count of 60 million, but this everything
link |
is potentially, like water can drown everyone on earth.
link |
So this is incoherent.
link |
Well, I think nuclear weapons are bad, but nuclear energy is good.
link |
Well, nuclear weapons also can be good.
link |
You can easily make the argument, which I don't know that I subscribe to, that nuclear
link |
weapons prevented boots on the ground war, or it caused them to be much more contained.
link |
And they're also quite effective at changing the direction of an asteroid that's about
link |
to hit earth, as I've learned from a movie.
link |
And they're actually useful as Elon Musk has claimed for prior to colonizing Mars, making
link |
it more habitable.
link |
Got to do something.
link |
But yes, but I guess what I'm saying is there's a place for nuance.
link |
And there's some topics so hot, like communism, where nuance is very difficult to have.
link |
And I feel like with Nazi Germany, it was a similar thing at the time.
link |
You want to talk about Jeanette Rankin, who was one of my favorite people.
link |
So Jeanette Rankin was the first woman elected to Congress.
link |
She was elected before women's suffrage was a constitutional amendment from Montana.
link |
She was elected in 1916.
link |
She was one of a handful of people to vote against the US going into the Great War, which
link |
was the right call at the time.
link |
She was a pacifist Republican as well, coincidentally.
link |
She lost her seat, ran again in, was it 1940?
link |
Got the seat again, and was the only person to vote against getting into World War II.
link |
It was not a unanimous choice.
link |
Jeanette Rankin was the one person.
link |
And she said, you can no more win a war than you can win a hurricane.
link |
So she's one of these interesting, and talk about bravery.
link |
You're the one vote after Pearl Harbor to say, we're not doing this.
link |
And I mean, the pressure she must have been under at the time is, and of course, many
link |
people are not interested in hearing her perspective.
link |
She's evil, blah, blah, blah.
link |
It's also funny, someone on my Twitter when I talked about her goes, maybe she had Hitler's
link |
Like, yeah, Ms. Rankin was a big fan of Hitler.
link |
You figured it out, guys.
link |
Do you think there's an argument to be made that United States should not have gotten
link |
involved in World War II?
link |
The argument, I talk about this in The New Right.
link |
So on internet circles, there's something called Godwin's Law, which means the longer
link |
an internet conversation goes on, the probability someone gets compared to Hitler becomes one.
link |
In certain New Right circles, the longer the conversation goes on, the more likelihood
link |
that the argument will become we shouldn't have ended World War II also becomes one.
link |
And the argument is, at the very least, stay back, let Hitler and Stalin kill each other
link |
off, and then go in and knock off the weaker one.
link |
And you're going to be saving, destroying two nightmare systems.
link |
And I think that's an easy argument to make.
link |
Now, it's hard to pull off after Pearl Harbor.
link |
But in terms of strategy, I don't think that's a tough sell.
link |
What about after Pearl Harbor?
link |
I mean, that's what I'm saying.
link |
After Pearl Harbor, how are you going to sell it to the people?
link |
The argument is, blah, blah, the Holocaust.
link |
The Holocaust, there's no scenario where that doesn't happen, really, unless you're going
link |
But even so, Hitler had said, if the Jews launch another war, we're going to wipe them
link |
from the face of the earth.
link |
So the Jews are being held hostage by Hitler as an argument for this.
link |
Another thing he did, which was diabolical, is in order to make it that people could not
link |
accept Jews as refugees, if they were going to leave Germany, they had to be penniless.
link |
So now you have, it's not like they're coming over with money and they can take care of
link |
They're going to be completely destitute.
link |
It makes it harder to accept them, yeah.
link |
Millions of destitute people who don't speak the language, it's a tough sell.
link |
So speaking of good ones law, what do you make of this condition, Trump derangement
link |
And the idea of comparing Trump to Hitler?
link |
I think it's despicable.
link |
And I'll give you an example, something parallel that I think more people should be regarding
link |
Earlier in 2020, we were all told that unless we were in Syria immediately, the Kurds were
link |
going to be exterminated.
link |
They invoke the Holocaust.
link |
This is going to be another genocide.
link |
And if you're not for this, you're basically forcing another Holocaust.
link |
None of the people who use this argument, we didn't go to Syria, the Kurds were exterminated,
link |
they just vanished from the news, had any consequences for using this kind of a comparison.
link |
So I think it's really kind of fatuous.
link |
And I think it's amazing that people think Hitler's the only tyrant who ever lived.
link |
Like everyone who's bad is specifically Hitler.
link |
You know how you know he's not Hitler?
link |
Because you can tweet at him, and no one comes to your house to kill your family.
link |
Like that's kind of a big difference.
link |
Also there between Trump and many of his critics is that his grandchildren will be raised as
link |
So that's also kind of a, and Deborah Lipschad talks about this a lot.
link |
The New York Times at the time, there's another book called Buried by the Times, which talks
link |
about the New York Times in the World War II.
link |
Because the idea that Jews weren't white was the Hitler idea, the New York Times at the
link |
time, Salzburger, wanted to be against this idea.
link |
So they specifically downplayed the antisemitism as opposed to the Nazis are being oppressive.
link |
So the argument that you can separate Nazism from antisemitism is a historical debate people
link |
And my perspective is, I think it's, I do not find it convincing that you can separate
link |
I think antisemitism was essential to Nazism.
link |
I think Nazism and Mussolini's fascism have very big differences.
link |
And do you think, do you think antisemitism was fundamental to who Hitler was or was it
link |
So this is the interesting thing is like, was it a tool that he saw as being effective?
link |
No, he believed it.
link |
So why do you see those as intricately connected?
link |
Could Hitler have accomplished the same amount or more without the Holocaust?
link |
Because think about how many resources you had to divert at a time where you have Operation
link |
Barbarossa with Stalin.
link |
So why are they connected?
link |
Why are they so connected?
link |
Is it because Hitler was insane or was he a bad strategist or what?
link |
He was obviously a bad strategist.
link |
He had no need to open a second front.
link |
His generals, my understanding, told him this is crazy.
link |
It didn't work out for him at all.
link |
I mean, to draw Russia and her resources into that war, it makes absolutely no sense in
link |
There's a book about, I forgot what it's called, where it talked about him at that point was
link |
just high all the time on amphetamines and that could have affected his thinking.
link |
Yeah, there's a really good book on drugs.
link |
I forget what it's called, but yeah, it's a really good one.
link |
But it was, I mean, scapegoating is a big part and parcel of the Nazi mythology and
link |
this kind of one universal figure to explain this kind of skeleton key.
link |
But it could have been the communists.
link |
I mean, that could have been the source of the hatred.
link |
But the communists didn't get Germany into World War I like he said the Jews did.
link |
It seems to me that the atrocity of the Holocaust is the reason we see Hitler as evil.
link |
No, the reason we see Hitler as evil is because of World War II propaganda still.
link |
Because we don't see Stalin as evil.
link |
Right, that's my main point.
link |
We don't see Mao as evil to that extent.
link |
Like why would you say that?
link |
The nature of that propaganda.
link |
Because I think a lot of the problem for certain type of mentality is Hitler didn't mass
link |
So as long as you're killing just one group, it's a problem.
link |
But if you're murdering everyone equally, all of a sudden, it's like, what are you going
link |
So the fact like you were saying, the Hall of the Moor is not common knowledge.
link |
The fact that Mao's 50 million dead are not common knowledge and Richard Nixon can be
link |
raising a glass to him in China.
link |
These are things that I think the West has not done a good job reconciling.
link |
Frank, you for being my friend, Michael.
link |
And the heart attacks will say, Frank, you for being my friend.
link |
You got to do it like this.
link |
Now back to Hitler.
link |
Do you think Hitler could have been stopped?
link |
We kind of talked about it a little bit in terms of how to...
link |
What is the brave thing to do in the time of Nazi Germany?
link |
But do you think, I mean, I'm not even going to ask about Stalin in terms of could Stalin
link |
have been stopped?
link |
Because probably the answer there is no.
link |
But on the Hitler side, could Hitler have been stopped?
link |
I think a lot of these things, a lot of luck has to play with it.
link |
He was almost assassinated.
link |
If you mean by like the West, it's very hard.
link |
By the German people too.
link |
I mean, like if we're politically speaking, there was a rise to power through the thirties,
link |
through the twenties, really, I mean, like can whoever...
link |
It's not about Hitler.
link |
It's about that kind of way of thinking, that totalitarian control that always leads to
link |
trouble at sometimes at a mass scale.
link |
Could that have been stopped in Germany or maybe in the Soviet Union?
link |
I think this is one of the best arguments against radicalization in the States, which
link |
is how do you engage when you have like 30% of the population who are members of a party,
link |
which is dedicated to systemically overthrowing the existing democracy.
link |
Stalin gave orders that the communists who had a pretty sizable population, the Reichstag,
link |
that their target shouldn't be the Nazis, but the liberals and the social Democrats
link |
and they invented the term social fascist for them.
link |
So instead of, they're just like jihadis, instead of taking their sights on Nazism,
link |
they set their sights on the moderates because they figured the choice between Hitler and
link |
us we're going to win.
link |
And this was a huge gamble and they were all killed or had to flee and ones who fled were
link |
killed also by Stalin to my understanding.
link |
So this is an easy way where he could have been certainly heavily mitigated.
link |
What about France and England that it was obvious that Hitler was lying and they wanted
link |
peace so bad that they were willing to put up with it even after Czechoslovakia?
link |
Like this is the anti pacifist argument, which is like they should have threatened military
link |
But then the other anti, the anti anti pacifist argument is if you're going to remember Barack
link |
Obama had that, the red line, if you cross this red line in Syria, we're going to go
link |
in and Assad or whatever is like, yeah, cool.
link |
And he's like, oh, okay, well, sorry.
link |
So if you're threatening force, there's the great song lyric, don't show your guns unless
link |
you intend to fight, right?
link |
So if it's very clear with, with free countries through what's in the press, whether the institutional
link |
will is there to follow through on these threats.
link |
So I think we have been very hard for Chamberlain to rally the British people to take on Hitler
link |
just after the great, I mean, the suffering that Britain's took the great war, they still,
link |
you know, obviously it means so much more to them than does to us in the West.
link |
What about what do you make of Churchill then?
link |
Like why was Churchill able to rally the British people?
link |
Why was he like, do you give much credit to Churchill for being one of the great forces
link |
in stopping Hitler in World War II?
link |
I don't think that's really in dispute.
link |
I think he was very much regarded as this kind of the right man at the right time.
link |
And I think Chamberlain took a gamble.
link |
He, the expression peace in our time was Neville Chamberlain when he signed the appeasement
link |
with Hitler and he goes, we now have peace in our time, now go home and get a good night's
link |
That's what he said.
link |
Cause he's like, all right, you know, he's going to stop here.
link |
And it's not impossible that if you just gave him, like if you gave Saddam Hussein Kuwait,
link |
it's not impossible that he's not going to, you know, invade Saudi Arabia next or something
link |
The last thing I've read, it's like, of course there's, there's a, it's not impossible, but
link |
when you're in the room with Hitler, you should be able to see like man to man, like, like
link |
to me, a great leader should be able to see past the facade and see like, like, yes, everything
link |
in life is a risk, but it seems like the right risk to take with Hitler, like it's surprising
link |
I know there's charisma, but it's surprising to me.
link |
People did not see through this facade.
link |
I really hate the idea of hindsight and everything being 20, 20, and I think it's a very good
link |
Generally, I'm thinking generally not in this specific instance to give our ancestors more
link |
credit than they, than, than we tend to give them because people often, here's a great
link |
example from another context, which is a lightning rods.
link |
People always talk about religious people being stupid and superstitious and they weren't,
link |
they often were very well reasoned and example of this is lightning rods, which is every
link |
year whatever town, the church was the tallest building and that's the one that always got
link |
hit by lightning and got caught on fire.
link |
Now what, it's a coincidence that it's always the church, like that makes logical sense
link |
that they didn't realize, well, it's because the tallest and therefore that attracts electricity.
link |
And in fact, when they invented lighting rods, this is a controversy because it's like, well,
link |
how is God going to show his displeasure if now it's striking this lightning rod not burning
link |
So a lot of times things are a lot more coherent than we give them credit for.
link |
And again, Chamberlain didn't, he's the head of a parliamentary party.
link |
So he does not have the freedom in a sense that a Hitler would to be like, all right,
link |
we're doing this again, boys.
link |
We don't know what it's like in the room with Hitler.
link |
That's, that's, we really have no idea.
link |
But I think you have to think about that, right?
link |
Yeah, but you can, I can very easily see him in the room being very calm and charming.
link |
And then you think, okay, the guy with the speeches is the act and he's putting on a
link |
show for his people and this is the real one.
link |
So let's, let's take somebody as an example.
link |
Let's take our mutual friend, Vladimir Putin.
link |
I don't know why saying his name makes my voice crack.
link |
Because he's scared he can hear you.
link |
It's like Beetlejuice.
link |
So there's a lot of people that...
link |
Was he the one who built you?
link |
No, that was a, that was a collaboration.
link |
It's a double blind engineering effort where I was not told of who my maker was.
link |
There's a backstory, but...
link |
There's a talking cricket.
link |
He'll be a real boy someday.
link |
I talk about him quite a bit because I find him fascinating.
link |
Now there's a, there's a really important line that people say, like, why does Lex admire
link |
I do not admire Putin.
link |
I find the man fascinating.
link |
I find Hitler fascinating.
link |
I find a lot of figures in history fascinating, both good and bad.
link |
And the figures, just as you said, that are with us today, like Vladimir Putin, like Donald
link |
Trump, like Barack Obama, it's difficult to place them on the spectrum of good and evil
link |
because that's only really applies to like when you see the consequences of their action
link |
in a historical context.
link |
So there's some people who say that Vladimir Putin is evil.
link |
And based on our discussion about Hitler, that's something I think about a lot, which
link |
is in the room with Putin, and there's also a lot of historical descriptions of what it's
link |
like to be in the room with Hitler in the 1930s.
link |
There is a lot of charisma.
link |
In the same way, I find Putin to be very charismatic in his own way.
link |
The humor, the wit, the brilliance, there's a simplicity of the way he thinks that really,
link |
if taken at face value, looks like a very intelligent, honest man thinking practically
link |
about how to build a better Russia constantly, almost like an executive.
link |
He looks like a man who loves his job in a way that Trump, for example, doesn't, meaning
link |
like he loves laws and rules and how to...
link |
There's no adversarial press, so that's going to help.
link |
And he's popular with his people, that's also going to help enormously.
link |
I'm talking about strictly the man, directly the words coming out of his mouth, like all
link |
the videos and interviews I watch, I'm based on that, not the press, not the reporting.
link |
You can just see that here's a man who's able to display a charisma that's not...
link |
Like I can see, that's why I love Joe Rogan, is like you could tell the guy is genuine
link |
and is a good person.
link |
And you could tell immediately that once you meet Joe, that he's going to be offline, also
link |
You could tell there's signals that we send that are difficult to describe.
link |
In the same way, you could tell Putin is like he genuinely loves his job and wants to build
link |
There's the argument that he is actually an evil man behind that charisma, or is able
link |
to assassinate people, limit free press, all those kinds of things.
link |
What do we do with that?
link |
So what do human beings like journalists or what do other leaders when they're in their
link |
room with Putin do with those kinds of notions in deciding how to act in this world and deciding
link |
what policy to enact, all those kinds of things?
link |
Just like with Hitler, when Chairman is in the room with Hitler, how does he decide how
link |
Well, let's go back to my wheelhouse, which is North Korea.
link |
So when your entire world is based on being against Trump and everything Trump does is
link |
buffoonery or counterproductive, the conclusion of your reporting is going to be pretty much
link |
I was very hopeful that there would be some positive outlooks or outcomes rather of Trump's
link |
meeting with Kim Jong Un.
link |
It looked like there was a space for things to go a bit better.
link |
I talked about it a lot at the time.
link |
And Trump was under no illusions about who he was dealing with.
link |
People pretend that, oh, he was kind of naive.
link |
He had one of the refugees that had stayed the union, you know, lifting up his crutch.
link |
The first thing he sat down and talked to Xi Jinping about in Mar a Laga right after
link |
he became inaugurated was North Korea.
link |
Barack Obama said that when he sat down Trump in the White House during the transfer of
link |
power, he said North Korea is the biggest issue.
link |
So I think a good leader, whether or not you consider Trump a good leader, has to be aware
link |
of, all right, I'm going to have to have relationships of some kind, even if it's adversarial, with
link |
some really evil, evil, horrible people, which Kim Jong Un clearly is.
link |
Well, I don't think there's anybody that has a perspective that North Korean Kim Jong
link |
Un or ill are not evil, right?
link |
But with, in 1930s Germany, isn't it a little bit more nuanced and difficult?
link |
Yeah, because Hitler hasn't done anything yet and he's just a blowhard and he's an anti
link |
Semite, sure, but he's...
link |
What about like before the war breaks out, like what about the basic actionable anti
link |
Semitism when you're like just attacking, hurting?
link |
Are you talking about Kristallnacht or are you talking about the Night of Long Knives?
link |
So it's the Night of the Broken Glass.
link |
Yeah, yeah, the Long Knives is when he assassinated a bunch of his people, that was something
link |
Yeah, so like when you're actually attacking your own citizenry.
link |
Yeah, that was universally condemned, Kristallnacht, and that was very shocking, its level of barbarism
link |
Because I think we still want to believe, understandably, that things aren't as bad
link |
We would rather...
link |
This is why the North Korea book I did, Dear Reader, is used in a humorous framework because
link |
if you have to look, it's like looking to the sun.
link |
If you stared it straight on, it's very hard to do.
link |
So you have to kind of look at it obliquely and then you're kind of realizing the enormity
link |
And again, pogroms in Russia had been a thing for a very long time.
link |
And there's a difference between, okay, we're going to sack these villages and persecute
link |
people and we're going to systematically exterminate them.
link |
There's still levels of evil and depravity.
link |
So you did write the book, Dear Reader, on Kim Jong Il, Dear Reader, the unauthorized
link |
autobiography of Kim Jong Il.
link |
So that's the previous leader of North Korea.
link |
Third one is the un, no creativity on the naming.
link |
Well, no, this is intentional because it's a throwback to the dad.
link |
So there's been only three leaders in North Korea.
link |
So we've talked about the history of Hitler and Stalin, men like these.
link |
I think it's important to understand that the history of those kinds of humans, there's
link |
the history of North Korea is not well written about or understood, which is why your book
link |
is exceptionally powerful and important.
link |
So maybe in a big broad way, can you say who was, who is Kim Jong Il as a man, as a leader,
link |
as a historical figure that we should understand and why should we understand them?
link |
So I wrote Dear Reader by going to North Korea and getting all their propaganda, which is
link |
translated into several languages because the conceit is everyone on earth is interested
link |
in them and wants to mirror their ideology.
link |
And he died in 2011 and you wrote the book in 2012.
link |
I went there in 2012.
link |
I wrote the book, came out in 2014.
link |
So Kim Jong Il is, though not an intellect, North Korea's version of Forrest Gump in that
link |
when they write their history, whenever something happens, he's there.
link |
And by telling his life story, it's in the first person, he's telling the history of
link |
So I wanted to write the kind of book where in one book, and it's the kind of reading
link |
you could do in the beach or the bathroom, you're gonna get the entire history and know
link |
everything you need to know about North Korea in one accessible outlet.
link |
And it's what people don't appreciate about North Korea, there's several things, how bad
link |
And this didn't happen overnight.
link |
This was very systemic that what this family did to that country where piece by piece,
link |
they did everything in their power to hermetically seal it from the rest of the world, ramp up
link |
the oppression, keep any information from coming in.
link |
And they're very creative and innovative in their style of manipulation and control.
link |
So there is a farcical element.
link |
Let me give you an example.
link |
So people in the West kind of get it wrong.
link |
They talk about, oh, they talk about when Kim Jong Il played golf for the first time,
link |
they get 17 holes in one.
link |
There's this one story about Kim Jong Il shrinking time.
link |
And this is a story, it sounds supernatural, but it's not.
link |
So Kim Jong Il is at a conference, the Dear Leader, and someone is giving a talk.
link |
And while that person is giving a talk, Kim Jong Il is taking notes and working on his
link |
And he has an aide who keeps interrupting him with questions and the speaker keeps stopping.
link |
And Kim Jong Il says, why are you stopping, goes, I see you're doing these other things.
link |
And he goes, no, no, I can do all these things at once, everyone's shocked.
link |
And they said, this is why Kim Jong Il looks at time, not like a plane, but like a cube,
link |
and he can shrink time.
link |
And my friend goes, do they mean multitasking?
link |
And yes, Kim Jong Il is the only person in North Korea who's capable of multitasking.
link |
So in order to elevate him, they basically make everyone else in North Korea completely
link |
And that has a purpose because should the leader go away, this country is going to collapse
link |
So they laugh in the West about all these newspapers show him at the factory and he's
link |
at the fish hatchery at the paper plant.
link |
They say the difference in North Korea is that the leader goes among the people and
link |
does what he calls field guidance.
link |
So he will go in that farm and be like, this is what you need to do.
link |
And he'll go here and he's so smart, he's good at everything.
link |
And thanks to him for sharing his wisdom with us.
link |
And he's not removed from the people like in every other country.
link |
Why does that seem to go wrong with humans, do you think that this kind of the structure
link |
where there's this one figure, this authoritarian, this totalitarian structure where there's
link |
one figure that's a source of comfort and knowledge?
link |
Kim Jong Il is not good at farming.
link |
Kim Jong Il is not good at the machinery.
link |
It's all a complete lie.
link |
Or the things he'll point out will be things that are completely obvious.
link |
So here's another example that they use.
link |
In North Korea, they have something called the Tower of the Juche Idea, which is an obelisk,
link |
which looks like the Washington Monument.
link |
But it's completely different because it's got this like plastic torch at the top.
link |
And they talk about in their propaganda how all the architects got together and they said,
link |
oh, we should make this the second tallest stone obelisk in the world.
link |
And Kim Jong Il says, no, let's make it the tallest.
link |
They're like, we never thought of this before.
link |
And the way it's presented as if, and like, he's the first person to think of this, like
link |
these architects are having a brainstorming session at the Tower of the Juche Idea.
link |
They're like, all right, we got to do something innovative to put North Korea on the map.
link |
How about second biggest?
link |
He's going to go for this.
link |
And then he's like, make, oh, we never thought of this.
link |
It's so, because I present it at face value, people sometimes say the book's a satire.
link |
It's not a satire.
link |
I downplayed all this stuff.
link |
Here's another example.
link |
North Korea is very big.
link |
And I think Russia is to some extent too, on amusement parks, funfairs, they call them,
link |
in the British style, because this is a chance for the people to all get together.
link |
And there was this amusement park, it's almost like South Park, Cartman, where there's all
link |
And Kim Jong Il's like, I'm not going to let any elderly or children take these rides until
link |
I put myself in danger and ride them myself.
link |
And they go, but dear leader, it's drizzling.
link |
And he goes, no, I have to make sure these rides are going to be safe for everyone, even
link |
during the light rain.
link |
They go, well, can we go on these rides with you?
link |
I have to be the courageous one.
link |
And he's riding all the rides and they're standing there crying at his courage.
link |
But that's what's, and you ask all the things in one power.
link |
It's like, listen, I'm quite confident that those funfair engineers are in a position
link |
to ride Modest Mouse, whatever it's called, by themselves and be like, yeah, okay, this
link |
is good for the kids.
link |
Although to be fair, some of those amusement parks are pretty rusty and dangerous.
link |
That kind of propaganda, I guess what I'm playing a devil's advocate is like, it's comforting
link |
But it does seem that that naturally leads to an abuse of power.
link |
How can it be used correctly?
link |
No one person has the intellect or the mind to understand the entirety of an economy,
link |
let alone every individual field of interest.
link |
Well, for example, you can have an artificial intelligence system that understands the entirety
link |
Your affect just completely changed.
link |
I guess you could have an artificial intelligence system.
link |
But the question is, can that, I mean, the human version of that is like, you can hire
link |
a lot of experts, right?
link |
You can be an extremely good manager.
link |
Since everything's dynamic, they're not going to have the data to kind of manage it well.
link |
It seems that there's a, like what George Washington allegedly did, it seems like most
link |
humans are not able to fire themselves.
link |
You're not able to like, ultimately be a check on your own power.
link |
But that's not, if I was creating a human, that's not an obvious bug of the system that
link |
we would not be able to fire ourselves, to know when we have, I mean, it seems like that's
link |
something you have to know always, like that's something I often wonder is like, am I wrong
link |
Well, this is what we talked about earlier, what are the safety valves to make sure that,
link |
okay, if I am incorrect, or my knowledge is finite, Plato's cave kind of thing, what mechanisms
link |
are in place that my mistake or limited information isn't going to have the deleterious consequences?
link |
And North Korea does not really have that, and as a result, they had polio in the 90s.
link |
So there is a, you write about it straight, but there's a humor to it, because it's an
link |
absurdly evil place, I suppose.
link |
A bunch of people, I asked, I said that I'm talking to you and a bunch of people ask questions.
link |
Oh, I got to hear from the plebs, you asked me before we started recording, I specifically
link |
said no, it was my contract.
link |
Yeah, and you gave, I gave you all the pink skittles or whatever.
link |
So pink skittles, you know, pink.
link |
I'm trolling, Michael, let me explain to you how that works.
link |
We should go at malice.locals.com and sign up and pay, I think the membership fee is
link |
several thousand dollars, it's very, it's not.
link |
It's not for the layman.
link |
Yeah, but the service is excellent.
link |
You get a coat with it.
link |
But yeah, I went there, posted a lot of really brilliant people there, people should join
link |
If you find Michael interesting, or if you just want to go and say why he's wrong, it's
link |
a great place to have that.
link |
It's not a good place for that, I assure you.
link |
A lot of really kind people.
link |
So anyway, there's a bunch of people ask that we should talk about humor.
link |
So pretend hypothetically speaking that I'm a robot asking you to explain humor to me.
link |
So dear reader, I mean, there's a humor, you so wonderfully dance between serious dark
link |
topics and then seriously dark humor.
link |
Can you try to, if you were to write like a, I don't know, a Wikipedia article, maybe
link |
a book about your philosophy of humor, what do you think is the role of humor in all of
link |
A joke is like a baby.
link |
You can't dissect it and then put it back together and expect it to work.
link |
Trust me on this one.
link |
Despite no matter how you carve that thing up, it's not going to be working the next
link |
And you need it to sew those little sneakers with those hands.
link |
I don't know that humor is something that is very explainable.
link |
People there's something called claptor, where this is like the worst kind of humor where
link |
people applaud because they agree with what you're saying, as opposed to laughter.
link |
That's the poetry reading and the drag queens do that too, I think because of the nails.
link |
You laugh, it's a visceral reaction.
link |
When someone on Twitter is insisting, you know, that's not funny, you're not in a position
link |
to make that claim.
link |
And let's go back to North Korea.
link |
I had a refugee I knew and he went to high school here and he was talking to his buddies
link |
and they said, hey, remember when we were kids, we had Pokemon and he goes, oh yeah,
link |
except instead of Pokemon, I watched my dad starve to death, which is the truth.
link |
Now, who are any of us to tell him not to make that joke?
link |
I don't know what it's like watching anyone, including my dad, starve to death and my dad's
link |
fatty so he's not going hungry anytime soon.
link |
So it's very bizarre to me when people feel comfortable precluding others from making
link |
jokes, especially, and I think this is a very Jewish thing, like this kind of gallows humor,
link |
especially when it's laughing about a personal loss or experience that they've had.
link |
Humor is a great way to mitigate pain and suffering.
link |
But it's also, I think this is why it's a Jewish thing, it's a black thing.
link |
When you are a marginalized community or poorer, it's free.
link |
Telling stories, telling jokes or songs, you don't have to have money, but you can have
link |
joy and happiness.
link |
And I think that's why you find it so much more in kind of lower status communities than
link |
you find in like wasps who are notoriously humorless.
link |
Which is strange because people pay you a lot of money for the jokes you do, so it's
link |
Yeah, well, nope, they don't have to pay me.
link |
It's appreciated but not expected.
link |
I find my voice cracking every time I try to make a joke, like I fail miserably at this.
link |
You're still in beta, that's what I thought.
link |
Being an alpha is like being a lady.
link |
If you have to tell people you are, you aren't.
link |
No, I meant alpha version.
link |
I don't know if you're a robot gobbledygook.
link |
I'm not going there, okay.
link |
Who are you talking to?
link |
I'm talking to myself in my own head.
link |
Okay, speaking of North Korea, some people say that, you know, I've read that comedy
link |
Well, first of all, do you agree?
link |
And second of all...
link |
It's very much about timing.
link |
No, just that you're saying yes.
link |
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
link |
Isn't it comedy is tragedy plus timing?
link |
This is not the full reference.
link |
The interrupting cow knock knock joke.
link |
I'm not going to do it, but...
link |
That's not a timing thing.
link |
It's more of a repetition and then the twist ending.
link |
You're thinking of the banana one.
link |
Anyway, I'm not going there.
link |
Who are you talking to?
link |
Are you small wonder?
link |
Do you stand sleeping in a wardrobe?
link |
That's so British.
link |
But yet you're very...
link |
I don't want to stay in a closet because that has connotations.
link |
Let's both come out of the closet for a second.
link |
Let's talk about...
link |
I wasn't saying, I love you, Alex.
link |
I was saying, I love you, Lex.
link |
Oh, you're talking to me.
link |
Yes, through the screen.
link |
So you think about me when you're with another man.
link |
I watch you when you're sleeping.
link |
Okay, so you're really active on Twitter.
link |
And somebody else asked on your overly expensive membership site, how do you find humor different
link |
in writing on Twitter versus spoken humor?
link |
So if humor is about timing, how do you capture the timing and the brilliance of the whatever
link |
is underlying humor in the context of Twitter?
link |
Like another way to say it is how do you be funny and yet thoughtful on Twitter?
link |
So with Twitter, you have to be the first one to the punchline.
link |
So when Ron Paul had a stroke, I was immediately being like, he's still the most articulate
link |
He's doing a great Joe Biden impression right now.
link |
All the libertarians got ass mad.
link |
So like too soon, or like when someone dies, you're making the jokes about them.
link |
It's like, when do you want to make the jokes about someone just died a week later?
link |
It doesn't make any sense.
link |
Too soon is perfect timing.
link |
Or you could say it's not appropriate ever, but too soon does not make sense in this context.
link |
So that is something that I enjoy doing.
link |
It's also fun ruffling people's feathers, something I enjoy doing.
link |
I think spoken versus writing is very different because when you are having good banter with
link |
someone, for me as the audience, knowing that it is on the spot really adds an element of
link |
humor because then it's like, wow, this is fun.
link |
It's like a ping pong match or something.
link |
Whereas in writing, you're losing the tone, you're losing the relationship of a dynamic
link |
And a lot of times the joke is just going to be a different type of joke.
link |
Well, it's funny, but Twitter, there's a sense, especially your Twitter, that you just thought
link |
of that and you just wrote it.
link |
Like there's a feeling like it's literally you talking as opposed to what I imagine is
link |
there's some editing or it doesn't look like it.
link |
Whoever your editor is should be fired.
link |
There's an interesting effect actually.
link |
If I want to say something, I don't know, about something that's bothering me about
link |
the presidential election or something like that, what is the actual central idea that
link |
I'm trying to convey to myself?
link |
Like if say I was having a hypothetical conversation with myself in my head, why am I putting my
link |
I'm more comfortable this way.
link |
Promo code MALICE20, sheathunderwear.com, okay.
link |
What's the website?
link |
Sheathunderwear.com.
link |
Sheathunderwear.com, promo code MALICE20.
link |
And I forgot, why is that underwear really nice?
link |
Because it has a dual pouch technology to keep your man parts separate.
link |
They've also got woman stuff, but I don't know how that works.
link |
There's a thing worth going somewhere.
link |
And the material is really refreshing.
link |
I mean, it's really...
link |
And it makes your ass look good.
link |
That's promo code MALICE20.
link |
And it's made by a former vet because he was in Iraq.
link |
So that's why I like promoting it.
link |
But what I'm writing the tweet, I like to...
link |
It forces me to think deeply about the core of the message.
link |
But what I found, this really interesting effect, like I don't really do much editing
link |
on the tweet, I'll just think and then I'll write it.
link |
And then when I post it, like submit, I immediately see the tweet very differently than it was
link |
I often delete, I delete, I don't know, some percentage of tweets about two, five seconds
link |
Once you send it, it's why the Gmail send features, undo send feature is really nice.
link |
It's like it just changes the way I see the thing.
link |
So it's very interesting.
link |
But I really love it that you can delete it because when I say stuff out in the wild,
link |
like to other humans, like spoken word is like, you can't delete what you just said.
link |
And I often regret the things I say, like on the spot, like I shouldn't have said that.
link |
I don't have that.
link |
Well, again, whoever your editor is, what is it, Edith Piaf, Jeannine Hicart Han?
link |
Wow, your French is as bad as your English.
link |
I don't have any tweets I regret because if I sent a tweet that I regretted, I would make
link |
I would make it a point if I was needlessly offensive to somebody or hurtful or accidentally,
link |
I would make sure to fix it and go out of my way to make sure that person feels vindicated
link |
and validated by accepting my apology.
link |
That has never happened, had to happen, thankfully.
link |
I'm also someone who is not big on taking the bait.
link |
Some recently some people have come after me pretty hard.
link |
And my perspective is that it's not really about me.
link |
It's either I represent something to them.
link |
I'm just a jackass with the Twitter.
link |
So if you're getting this riled up over me, it's not really about me.
link |
Maybe I'm delusional, but that's how I look at it.
link |
So if they are trying to provoke me into this kind of heated exchange, I will never do it
link |
because I'm not interested in it.
link |
And I don't think there's going to be any, like Jeannette Rankin, you can't win.
link |
It's just going to be like trying to win a hurricane.
link |
There's no hero here.
link |
Well, let me ask you about this because somebody also asked that on your overly expensive membership
link |
site that like they were saying that they're an academic.
link |
They wondered, because I'm an academic, quote unquote, I'm not an academic, but I do still
link |
have an affiliation with MIT.
link |
The word academic is just dirty, which is a problem that needs to change.
link |
Just like the word nerd is dirty.
link |
No, academic needs is going to be the next front to open and they're going to be very
link |
We're coming for them and it's going to be very, very ugly.
link |
And I cannot wait.
link |
No, but there needs to be a place, a different term for people who love research and knowledge.
link |
So like you have to clarify what you mean by academic and right now the word academic
link |
means in the intellectual public discourse, it means the enemy.
link |
And there's a lot of people that perhaps deserve that targeted vilification, but like a lot
link |
They're just curious people that are just building robots that will one day destroy
link |
Voice cracks every time I make a joke.
link |
You're not consistent.
link |
Because you're not making a joke, you're telling the truth.
link |
Can I delete that joke?
link |
That's not even a joke.
link |
Robots building robots that will one day kill us.
link |
Humans are the joke.
link |
That's why I'm cracking.
link |
My voice is cracking.
link |
What was I even fucking saying?
link |
My local, someone had a question.
link |
They're an academic.
link |
They're an academic.
link |
They're saying like, are you worried that in academia, associating yourself with a sort
link |
of somebody who can be misconstrued to have radical ideas, like the two examples they
link |
gave is Michael Malice and Joe Rogan.
link |
Does Joe have any radical?
link |
I wouldn't consider him radical at all.
link |
Well, we can talk about it.
link |
But Joe is, I think, a bad example.
link |
He's quite centrist to me.
link |
Well he could have, for example, like what has Joe been attacked on?
link |
It's, for example, on the topic of like transgender athletes in sports, there's what else?
link |
I mean, he's been pro Bernie Sanders and pro Trump or like giving Trump a pass.
link |
None of these are radical.
link |
Meat stuff, being pro meat versus anti vegan.
link |
All those kinds of things.
link |
But you can be misconstrued and saying, there's I think a highlight, my mom actually wrote
link |
to me about this, which is hilarious.
link |
I said, I like how you jot it down.
link |
That's when it's important.
link |
That's a sign, my voice cracks, a sign when Michael Malice makes a funny joke when you
link |
jot something down.
link |
He writes it and then the next time he crosses it out.
link |
It's like Joe Biden and the debates.
link |
I did also just crap my pants.
link |
So there's a, I mean, he's a comedian.
link |
You have a comedian side to you, right?
link |
I mean, you're, you've talked humorous side humorous.
link |
So you can misconstrued like Joe is being somehow a radical thinker and the same can
link |
And his question was, how are you worried about associating yourself with folks like
link |
That's a good question.
link |
And is that something, do you see yourself as somebody who's dangerous that I shouldn't
link |
And in the same way, do you ever think about guests on your podcast or people you talk
link |
to publicly, associate yourself with publicly and think that there is somebody that crosses
link |
that line that you shouldn't talk to?
link |
So I interviewed in the new ride, I interviewed like up to full blown Nazis in the last chapter
link |
is that Chris Cantwell, but that was in the context of that book, right?
link |
So there's lots of people who people want me to have on my show.
link |
And the way I look at it is like you have a table and tablecloth, right?
link |
And let's suppose the table is three feet wide.
link |
The tablecloth is two feet wide.
link |
So if I move the tablecloth to the right, I'm going to lose people on the left.
link |
I can only cover so much space.
link |
And the further you go on the fringe in one direction, the more mainstream you're going
link |
to lose on the other direction.
link |
So I'm very much making a conscious choice not to talk to being, people will say I'm
link |
cowardly and that's absolutely true.
link |
I'm being fearful here.
link |
I would prefer not to talk to some of those who would alienate some of the more mainstream
link |
And here's a perfect example of why.
link |
On my birthday last year, I woke up seven o clock in the morning to go pee.
link |
And I checked Twitter or whatever, and Jeb Bush had followed me, Jeb.
link |
And it's seven a.m., you're not really awake.
link |
You're like, wait, what?
link |
And then I thought maybe it was a fake account, but it's in the verified tab.
link |
Oh, you don't have this because you're not verified on Twitter, that's a shame.
link |
So people who are mad are on Twitter.
link |
Twitter does not respect robots.
link |
It's zero, zero, zero.
link |
Those are my pronouns.
link |
So it was Jeb, Jeb, Governor Bush, and I corresponded with him and I asked him on the show and he
link |
decided not to for various reasons.
link |
Very politely, he's like, just politics is so bad right now, I don't want to talk about
link |
And I respect that for him.
link |
If I'm creating my show where he's going to get heat and get canceled, oh, you can't be
link |
He has these other guests.
link |
I don't want to lose that opportunity because as we were talking about earlier, me and Alex
link |
Jones and Tim Pool, I think a lot of people would be very excited to see me sit down with
link |
And I told him in writing, and I meant this, I wouldn't be clowning him.
link |
I wouldn't be disrespectful.
link |
It would be a lot of fun.
link |
There's a goofball side to him that comes out sometimes and I would do my best to bring
link |
that out and talk about what it's like being a blue blood to be born into his grandfather,
link |
Prescott Bush was a Senator from Connecticut, marrying a woman who didn't speak English.
link |
How does that work when your family's royalty and things like that?
link |
So I had a lot of fun questions for him and that's kind of, you're going to have to choose
link |
Well, you do a really good job with that.
link |
Like Ben Shapiro does a good job with that too, which is you can have multiple, you can
link |
have a trolley side, humor side where you tear down the power structures and so on,
link |
but you can also have a serious side and it's a safe space for people from all walks of
link |
life to walk in and you're not adversarial.
link |
So I take the word guests seriously.
link |
If they're going to be on my show, I'm not going to have them have negative consequences
link |
as a result of being on my show.
link |
That said, I mean, maybe in my case, I'll be honest and say that I find Alex Jones outside
link |
of the conspiracy stuff for some reason, maybe you can explain, maybe you can psychoanalyze
link |
me, but I find him hilarious to listen to.
link |
He's very performative.
link |
But there's a lot of people that don't see the humor of it and they see the serious consequences
link |
of spreading conspiracy theories of different kinds and they see the danger of it.
link |
And I personally, I'm often tempted to talk to Alex in a podcast format, but I think I'm
link |
trying to convince myself that I never will.
link |
For me, I feel unsafe talking to Alex because I can't truly be myself, which is like naive
link |
And actually, I generally, when I talk to humans, I want to see the best in them.
link |
And I think that's like, I often think about if I talked to Hitler in 1935, 1938.
link |
You got a list of names to give him.
link |
Well, yeah, I mean, that's how you get the interview.
link |
Come on, let's be honest.
link |
Who are we kidding?
link |
I would, you have to give away one of your, I would probably give away one of my brothers,
link |
How many brothers do you have?
link |
I want to be an only child.
link |
He's the older brother.
link |
He used to pick on me.
link |
You know, it's only, he had a good life.
link |
You should think of it more as Stalin, so I don't interrupt you, because Hitler, you're
link |
You're already going to have very adversarial, he's not going to perceive you as a human
link |
in a sense, right?
link |
Stalin, you're right.
link |
That would be much easier.
link |
Or Kim Jong Un or something like that.
link |
Do you think, like how, okay, this is a good question, is, and that's, why don't you judge
link |
If you, alright, we'll cross it out in a second.
link |
I think this is a really good example of a difficult figure that's controversial that
link |
people bring up to me a lot, and you've interviewed twice, which is Curtis Yarvin.
link |
Yeah, Manchester Smallbug.
link |
Manchester Small, AKA Manchester Smallbug, which is his pseudonym that he goes by in
link |
Can you tell me about who he is?
link |
Why is he interesting?
link |
What of his ideas are interesting?
link |
Well, briefly, he invented the concept, the red pill.
link |
So Curtis, Manchester Smallbug had a blog called Unqualified Reservations, you can still
link |
It's very verbose.
link |
He writes at length, very, very bright.
link |
His perspective is very heretical.
link |
So a lot of things that we take for granted in our liberal democracy, he regards as not
link |
only incorrect, which is downright absurd, and he does not take what many people view
link |
as the basis of American political discourse as the basis for his thought.
link |
So when you're starting with someone who is basically repudiating the American milieu,
link |
a lot of people are going to, of course, regard him as dangerous or someone who is verboten.
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He's a very bright person.
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Why is he such a toxic figure?
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Because if you are blue pilled, if you are the guardians of what is acceptable discourse,
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then you have to make sure your forts are secured, and that any figure outside of this
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acceptable discourse has to be marginalized and regarded as radioactive as possible.
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You don't want to let in these kind of ideas that would be destructive to your hegemony.
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So let's dig into it.
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So I've read a few things by him, but then I hear that in a bunch of places, him being
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called a racist, a white supremacist, neo fascist, so on.
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I go to his Wikipedia.
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There's a view on race section.
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Yarvin's opinions have been described as racist, with his writings interpreted as supportive
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of slavery, including the belief that whites have higher IQs than blacks for genetic reasons.
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Yarvin himself maintains that he's not a racist because while he doubts that, quote,
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all races are equally smart, the notion, quote, that people who score higher on IQ tests are
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in some sense superior human beings is, quote, creepy.
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He also disputes being an outspoken advocate for slavery, though he has argued that some
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races are more suited for slavery than others, quote, it should be obvious that although
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I'm not a white nationalist, I am not exactly allergic to the stuff.
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Yarvin wrote in a post that linked approvingly of, I don't know these people, Steve Saylor.
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Steve Saylor, yeah, he's from.
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Jared Taylor and other racialists.
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Okay, so like, one of my questions is.
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Let me just say one sentence.
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In the same way that you had, you mentioned that guy earlier who was defending some aspects
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of communism, and that is, in some context, acceptable when you think about it, it's like
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this should be radioactive.
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The fact that he is engaging with these ideas in anything other than this has to be reputed
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at all costs is what renders him to a large extent a racist.
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That's really interesting.
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There are some topics you can be nuanced and some not, and communism is still a topic that
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you can be nuanced about.
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It's difficult, but you can be.
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Race and this like talking about slavery and IQ differences based on race is a topic that
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I guess is radioactive to a degree where you can't even say anything, even if it's like
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nuanced or not even like making a point, it's like touching it as you make another point.
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And understandably, you can understand that I'm going to steel man their point, because
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you can understand the point.
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It's like you're just talking about Hitler.
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Once this foot gets in the door that some people are inherently slaves or some people
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are inherently better than others, it really quickly collapses, so that would be their
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But that's what, like if I were to give criticism of his...
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But let me just say one more thing.
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Racist is also used to describe Alex Jones.
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Alex doesn't talk about race.
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Racist is a shorthand for a certain percentage of the population to let you know, do not
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bother investing in this person any further.
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They're off limits.
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Yeah, so definitely.
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Racism and sexism is a thing that's now used to shut down conversation that's quite absurd
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by a small percent of the population.
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But Jared Taylor and Steve Saylor, Jared Taylor interviewed him for my book, he would be regarded
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in any sense as a racist.
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What's the difference between racist and racialists?
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So racialists, I mean, this is splitting hairs and now I'm gonna be all radioactive, Jared
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Taylor runs something called Amarin and this is, I mean, his perspective is that there
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are inherent differences for the races and you cannot live side by side, well, whites
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and blacks should not be living side by side.
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And by the way, for people who don't know, this is out of context, you have written a
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great book that includes some of these concepts called The New Right, which does not include
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these concepts, but talks about, well, it's more about the growth of the community around
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the alt right and all those kinds of the world.
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So and his point about IQ, it's like, if you had a population, the Dutch, right, I think
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they're the tallest people on earth.
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And if you said, well, the Dutch are the best people on earth, why?
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Because they're the tallest, it's like you're a crazy person.
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So if someone is scoring low, an individual on an IQ test, that means they're somehow
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a lower quality person.
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Well, maybe one very specific aspect, but I mean, if they're a good human being, I've
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got friends who are low IQ, all my friends are low IQ, frankly, compared to me, sound
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like Trump there for a second.
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That's how you choose.
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Well, I don't have any other choices, no one's gonna be at my level.
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You're the smartest person since Abraham Lincoln that I've ever seen.
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Unlike him, I actually am honest.
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So he is someone who very much swims in heretical ideas.
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Here's another thing, like if you bring up that Aristotle said that some people are born
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to be slaves, he wasn't speaking about race, he just meant people's souls.
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Mencken, who's a great heretic and early 20th century figure, one of his quotes that I say
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all the time, which people have seen a lot in this past year, that the average man does
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not want to be free, he merely wants to be safe.
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That I think speaks, I don't know, I am not familiar with what Mulbug's saying about slavery
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because his writing is ponderous, but that certainly is something I think that is undeniable,
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that I think more people are realizing there's a large percent of the population that is
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actively disinterested in freedom and the more responsibilities it entails.
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Well, I mean, really just the word slavery, if you want to make some kind of point or
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even think about the topic outside the context of this is a horrible thing that happened
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in the United States history.
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And other countries history is not unique to us, let's be clear.
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This is very important in their slavery going on today and a lot of people argue that sex
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trafficking and all those kinds of things, I mean, there's atrocities going on today
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that talking about it in a way that's not immediately saying this is the most horrible
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thing that happened ever, it's something I think about a lot is like if I want to say
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something controversial, I should do so with skill, with care, and only about things I
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Well, here's where I would disagree.
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When I say things, I often say things that are controversial, or I will say uncontroversial
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things in a controversial way, because it's a useful mechanism to alienate people you
link |
don't want around you.
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Because if there are people who are going to be shocked by certain topics, like we should
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have ended World War II, like even as a hypothesis, they just clutch their pearls, they're like,
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oh, you want the Holocaust to happen?
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I can't discuss most things with you because you're not interested in having a conversation,
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you're interested in your emotional response.
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I see things differently, maybe this is a bit of a devil's advocate, but in at least
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the modern discourse of like Twitter and social media and so on, I find that if you do that,
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you're not actually removing the people that are not thoughtful and kind and so on, you're
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actually attracting loud people.
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Like a small number of them, they come over and start yelling at you, start yelling, they're
link |
basically ruin the party by showing up and just screaming, and so all the thoughtful
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Well, that's why you have to be a very heavy blocker.
link |
You have to block people on Twitter because you have to cultivate your audience and have
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them, like a lot of times people come at me, I don't care, then they'll start attacking
link |
members of my audience and then I'm like, dang, I got to block them because they've won
link |
this one because I can't have that.
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Yeah, I don't know, unnecessarily provoking people feels, this is beta testing, you try
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to break the system and see what works, you put up as much pressure as possible.
link |
This is very much computer stuff that you should be able to appreciate, the point being
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when you have a program, you're trying to intentionally sit there and do as many mistakes
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as you would go wrong.
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Is that not common practice?
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So you're saying that's a way to see communication with the world, as you say something uncontroversial
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in a controversial way and that blocks people.
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Or does it trigger them?
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Do they roll their eyes?
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What is going to be their emotional response?
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Are they going to start yelling?
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The problem is the reason I can't think like this, or I can't, because I'm not sure about
link |
the points I'm trying to make, always.
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I'm not always 100% sure that I'm right about things.
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So in being thoughtful, I'm afraid that I'll turn off with an eloquently phrased or even
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incorrect statement, I will do damage that can't be undone in terms of having a good
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conversation about a topic.
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So I want to be very careful about like, I'm not saying afraid, fear is not what I'm talking
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I think fear is like not saying something out of fear is at the core of the many of
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the problems of the world today.
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But I'm just saying be, say stuff with care.
link |
If I'm going to touch race as a topic, it feels like you really should be deeply, first
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have a point to make, like you really care about a point you want to make, and second,
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think deeply about how to say that point in a way that communicates it the best.
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And touching, I would say, listen, on your show, which is great, I mean, I'd like to
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say thank you for having Menchus Moberg.
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That's the name of the show.
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Thank you for having me.
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A couple of times, it's great to sort of get him to in this loose way to talk about different
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I don't think we talked about race at all.
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So I'm just bringing it back to what you were asking, which is if you read the Wikipedia,
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the perspective is going to be this guy talks about slavery constantly, where it's completely
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disproportionate to his work.
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But even on your show, you can tell even not outside of the race stuff that he's not ultra
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careful about, he's not nuanced.
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He's not afraid to say something just like, I would say, let me just criticize him, my
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face is not used as me, carelessly say something controversial.
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I'm not saying he doesn't go, that makes him, it's a very different thing than somebody
link |
who on purpose says something controversial stuff, like Milo Annapolis, sorry, I forgot
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Milo, whatever his name is.
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Which is really nice to see that he's a genuine person who's thoughtful, he doesn't mean to,
link |
but he just carelessly seems to say things that I feel like damaged the rest of his body
link |
I can't really speak for him, but I would guess his point is once you're swimming in
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this kind of worldview, you're going to be anathema already.
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So there's no pleasing these people, so why bother trying?
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Yeah, I think that's a deeply, that's a black pill way of seeing the world.
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It's not black pilled at all, because it's a cynical way that these people, so it's saying
link |
that it's a very kind of way of thinking, I'll say whatever I want, whoever comes along
link |
You just earlier said yourself that race, racism has been weaponized as a way to shut
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down conversation.
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So I think his perspective would be, I am so outside the mainstream in my worldview
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that I know I'm going to be called racism, racist.
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So there's no point in trying to be nuanced because I'm already going to get the scarlet
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Yeah, I just disagree with that because for example, I am one person that he turned off
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by his carelessness, and I think I should be a good target.
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I should be somebody.
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I think that's fair.
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And I'm just like, he, it's very convenient to think that there's ridiculous people out
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there, which they are, who call everybody racist and sexist currently.
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And then you can't please them.
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So I'm not even going to try, no, but there's like this gray area of people that I don't
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listen to the outreach culture, whatever that I don't, this Wikipedia article means nothing
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I'm not going to, I'm more, I'm just seeing this careless person.
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And if he's going to be careless about a race like this, I feel like if I walk along with
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him long enough, I'm going to catch the carelessness.
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I'm going to lose like, I'll defend your perspective better than you can.
link |
I talked to Eric Weinstein after you guys talked about me on your show.
link |
We had a good conversation.
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He invited me on his show.
link |
That would be an amazing conversation.
link |
And we got on the phone and his concern, fairly, he goes, I don't want you to come on my show
link |
for the purposes of clowning me.
link |
And I would never do that.
link |
He might not be aware of who you are.
link |
That's why he wants to feel me out.
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He's like, you know, when he hears troll, it can mean a lot of different things.
link |
And I, we had a very conversation and very much was very clear that that's not where
link |
the conversation would go.
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But I think when you are going to be on someone's show, there is a responsibility that they're
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not going to have to pay a cost for having you as their guests.
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So if you're perceived, if you were put off by how he was in that live streams or two,
link |
I did like, I understand where you're coming from.
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I think he's very, very bright, but you have a very, you have a different audience than
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And you're going for something different than I am.
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Like in my interest, the sense of.
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You wouldn't feel safe with him.
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I wouldn't feel safe with him.
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That's a really boring line for me.
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I think I would like to actually talk to him one day, Alex Jones has crossed the other
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Well, you could do what you could do with me, tape the episode and then never release
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No, it's, it's one of those things will be when there's finally they'll, they'll make
link |
a history channel documentary about you and I and how it all went wrong.
link |
Like the cult that we started and then everybody killed themselves.
link |
And there's a, we'll release it then because it'll be like unseen footage.
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This is how it started is it'll be black and white in a basement somewhere in New York.
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My mother's basement.
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Let's explain so much.
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So I spoke to Yaron Brooke about objectivism and Ayn Rand, he, he kind of argued, he highlighted
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difference between capitalism and anarchism as around the topic of violence and the, that
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having government be the sort of the, the negative way to say it is like having a monopoly
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on violence, but basically being the arbiter of, or the, the people that making sure that
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violence doesn't get out of hand.
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That would, you know.
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The government's great at that.
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Well, what, what's, okay.
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This is him with a straight face making that argument.
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Well, can you with a straight face argue for the idea that in anarchism, violence would
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not get out of hand?
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For one thing, if your worst argument against that, one of my little quotes is what are
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presented as the strongest arguments against anarchism are inevitably description of the
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So the argument is under anarchism, you know, you'd have warlords, you know, killing people
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and then you'd have, you know, whoever's strongest gets to just take over a neighborhood.
link |
Well, we have that now.
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We saw that the police are perfectly comfortable disarming the population.
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And then when they try to protect themselves or punished, they're, we're happy to stand
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You can't, you can only have that happen if you have a monopoly.
link |
If they're like, let's suppose you had a television stations, right?
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And CBS said, you know what?
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We're not going to broadcast.
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We're not going to broadcast.
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We're going to watch any of these other channels.
link |
So the problem with having monopoly is everyone has to be dependent on this issue.
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What's amazing about minarchism, which objectivists are, is they will argue that government is
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really, really bad at everything it does and it touches.
link |
Therefore it has to be in charge of the most important stuff.
link |
Well, that's not therefore, but, but there is a thing that's fundamentally different
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than all the other things.
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And Yaron Brook also said that no government has, this is on your show, has ever worked
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in the way he's proposing.
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Now objectivism, Ayn Rand's philosophy is based on objective reality.
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And what she posited is you look and study the facts of nature, facts of reality and
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deduce things accordingly.
link |
And she very much regards herself as part of the Aristotelian tradition, as opposed
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to the Platonist tradition, where the idea precedes reality and the idea is more real
link |
than what we see around us.
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So what he's saying is all the data, according to him, contradicts his argument, but still
link |
he's going to make this imaginary government that has never existed and there's no evidence
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that it can exist.
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Let's talk about objective law, to have access to the legal system, which is something we
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And just in terms of selling disputes, when you have a government monopoly, it's going
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to be more expensive, more difficult for poor people.
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The cost of hiring a lawyer is more expensive than hiring a surgeon.
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You can't say with a straight face, this is the only way or the best way.
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And the other thing is the argument for objectivism, against anarchism, they have this stupid
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claim it's like, what if you're a member of one security company and I'm a member of another
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and we have a dispute and one shows up the door.
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As if this is some insuperable argument.
link |
Well, we have that on earth.
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Every country is in a state of anarchism regarding every other country.
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We don't have a world government.
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So what happens if a Canadian kills an American in Mexico?
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I bet you don't have an idea.
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What I'm sure of is that system has been worked out ahead of time between the three countries
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and it's been worked out in such a way that you and I don't have to reinvent the wheel.
link |
Same thing with cell phone companies.
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If I'm on Sprint, you're on Metro PCS and I call you, who pays?
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Does Sprint pay you?
link |
Do they split the difference?
link |
First of all, there's no objective way that one has to work, but the thing is companies
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who have auto accidents, they have arbitrage all the time.
link |
Like if I run into you, they work it out and it never reaches our desk.
link |
So the only thing that cops are good at is keeping people, at any government monopoly,
link |
is forcing people to be their customers by keeping them unsafe.
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There's a few things I'd like to say there to just explore some of these ideas.
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So one is in terms of Canadian and Mexico and so on, that it does, something has been
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worked out perhaps.
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Do you know for sure that if there's a point I'm trying to make, so let's say for sure
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it's been worked out.
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There was a point in history where it wasn't worked out.
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To work, to come to a place of stability, there has to first be some instability.
link |
So when you first, like for every kind of situation, they're like dispute over space,
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like who gets to own Mars, that kind of thing.
link |
For it, and then these different competing institutions will have to figure it out.
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And so there's the concern with anarchism, I think, or with any kind of interaction.
link |
You said brilliantly that there's an anarchism relative to the, there's no one world government.
link |
Alex Jones enters the chat, but the fear is that there's going to be an instability that
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doesn't converge towards some stable place.
link |
That is not the fear.
link |
That is the goal under Ayn Rand's philosophy.
link |
Markets have something what they always talk about as being creatively destructive, which
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means you look at something that's been happening for a very long time.
link |
Every generation, every innovator starts chipping away at it.
link |
He finds better ways, marginal improvement or marginal, or it doesn't work and he goes
link |
When government tries to implement improvement, we all have to suffer the consequences.
link |
When an innovator does, it's a huge asymmetry.
link |
If it hurts, it only hurts him.
link |
If it succeeds, he becomes rich and we all profit as a consequence.
link |
But the fear of anarchism, I think, is that it will be non creative destruction.
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It'll be just destruction, right?
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It's not like the instability.
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Stability is one of these words that sounds objective, but has no real meaning.
link |
What field has stability?
link |
Let's suppose you want stability.
link |
Let's talk about medicine.
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Stability means we're not going to invent new diseases or new treatments, right?
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If you mean stability in terms of a baseline of security, we have that already.
link |
Very few relationships turn violent.
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Under an anarchist system, look at it right now.
link |
If you look at a bar full of drunken young males full of testosterone, if you look at
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a hotel where everyone is not native to the area, those are both far safer than the places
link |
that the government has taken upon itself to protect you.
link |
The parks, the alleyways, the streets, the subways.
link |
We have right now a comparison of which is better at keeping people safe.
link |
And it's very obvious that when something is private and under someone's control, and
link |
there would be layers of there'd be more police, but they wouldn't be a government monopoly.
link |
The store would have someone, the street would have someone, and you'd have your own personal
link |
security that would be attached to your phone.
link |
Having security as a function of geography as opposed to a function of you as an individual
link |
is a landline technology in a post cell phone world.
link |
So you think it's possible to have, psychologically speaking, as an individual among the masses,
link |
to have a sense of security even though there's not a centralized thing at the bottom of the
link |
Like, there's not a set of laws that are enforced based on geography like we have nations now.
link |
You can have a set of laws that are enforced in some kind of emergent agreed upon way.
link |
So like, basically, I want to go to a hotel and trust that I'll be able to get a room
link |
and nobody's going to break down the door and I don't know, take all my vodka.
link |
Let's take a different way.
link |
If you were worried about a hotel having bedbugs, that's not something the government's involved
link |
And that's not an unrealistic concern.
link |
Are there mechanisms right now that you can undertake to make sure that's not the case?
link |
So it would be the same thing with, I want to make sure I go to a hotel that has security.
link |
It would be exactly the same thing.
link |
And here's another example, kosher food.
link |
People who keep kosher, Jews who keep kosher, their food has to be prepared in a certain
link |
It has to meet higher rabbinical standards, right?
link |
If you look at food, it will have that certification, the K, and there's even competition there.
link |
There's the K and there's the stricter U letter.
link |
People don't notice it because they're looking for it.
link |
You would have companies certifying different locales for their level of security.
link |
And it would take an hour to have an app that would, just like when you have toll roads,
link |
That would tell you you're approaching an unsafe area, you're not going to be covered
link |
by us or, and you could have it color coded very easily.
link |
We could do this today.
link |
But the thing is, you're exactly correct, but there's an assumption of you're already
link |
in a, okay, you can give me a different word than stability, but you're already in a place
link |
where the forces of the market or whatever can operate.
link |
The worry is like, initially, you might not have enough stability to where you can choose
link |
one place over the other based on the security that they provide.
link |
We already have different types of security here because we have federal government, we
link |
have state governments and we have local governments.
link |
So and these often contradict each other.
link |
So the idea of the implausibility of having different security companies and having it
link |
be unstable or impossible, we already have a very rough example of it happening in real
link |
So how all of it started, the idea of, especially with Yaron, is like it all started with government
link |
monopoly of violence saying like, no kids, don't let violence get out of hand.
link |
We had a civil war where half the country was slaughtered.
link |
That's the display of the government not having a monopoly on the violence, right?
link |
It's like, that's the split.
link |
They had such a monopoly on the violence in the North that it could draft people to fight
link |
others that they didn't even care about.
link |
But there's a South.
link |
It's the government splitting because this is giant iceberg like splitting.
link |
The argument is that you would have something like a civil war much more often under anarchism.
link |
First of all, if you had a civil war much more often, we don't have that with car companies,
link |
We don't have a company that says, I refuse to pay or whatever.
link |
That's not violence.
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Sorry to interrupt.
link |
And I'm playing...
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Hold on, let me finish.
link |
It is violence because if I'm a company and I'm saying that my cars can run over yours
link |
with no consequences, this is a rough analog, why has that not happened?
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Now in terms of having security system, if I am free, just like switching cell phone
link |
to go from one provider to another and this one company as part of its payment doesn't
link |
want $50 a month, $100 a month, wants my son, I'm not going to be a member of this security
link |
company unless in that case we're dealing with something like a Pearl Harbor or foreign
link |
invasion where it's like all hands on deck.
link |
Let's go by evidence.
link |
How many places do have evidence of that you can have at a large scale?
link |
Well, it's absolutely in a large scale.
link |
Because it feels like once you don't know the person.
link |
eBay is an example of anarchism in practice.
link |
I am selling something to someone whose name I don't even know in a country that is nowhere
link |
proximate to me and eBay acts as the arbiter.
link |
Sometimes I don't get the money after I get screwed over, but that's far less than the
link |
taxation that I have to give to the federal government.
link |
It's a great point, but it's in the space of finance.
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If I could, if on eBay you could also commit violence.
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Theft is violence.
link |
Yeah, if you give me 10 grand for a car and I don't deliver anything, you've stolen 10
link |
Yes, but there's something uniquely problematic to being stabbed or shot.
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The reason you're stabbed or shot is because the government, despite its contract, is refusing
link |
to allow second amendment rights to be implemented among the citizenry and the people who are
link |
making that the case are the cops.
link |
They are the ones who are the traitors to the constitution and should be regarded as
link |
Whereas private companies are far more amenable to market pressures than the state is.
link |
It's a strong argument, but let's actually just briefly mention the scale thing.
link |
Why don't you think we should talk about scale?
link |
Because if you had anarchism just in Vermont or just in Brooklyn, well, fine.
link |
The people make the argument you need anarchism or else China's going to invade, but that's
link |
like saying what, do these little countries don't exist?
link |
Does San Salvador not exist?
link |
Some of them are violent, some of them are not, but the point is they're not all at moments
link |
notice about to be invaded.
link |
Kuwait's an example of this.
link |
Kuwait was invaded by Iraq and very quickly all the big countries who are interested in
link |
having your stability, safe space, got involved and kicked him out of Kuwait.
link |
If you had this company that was waging war on the population, it seems quite likely that
link |
the other organization would get together and put a stop to this because they're not
link |
in a position to provide this service of security to their customers.
link |
All of this is brilliant, but didn't you just say that we are actually in a state of anarchism
link |
relative to other countries?
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So isn't this what emerges?
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This is what, aren't we actually living in a state of anarchism where we all have agreed?
link |
I haven't agreed to anything.
link |
So the basic criticism you have is you're born on a geographical area and you're forced
link |
to have signed a bunch of stuff just by being born in a particular place.
link |
So really, if you could just much easier choose which space of ideas you associated with,
link |
that would be actually a state of anarchism.
link |
And you could have like a military that you sign up with.
link |
And you're certainly not putting people in prison to get raped because they're selling
link |
And you're certainly not allowing everyone else on the street who wants to be there.
link |
Can we say something nice about Ayn Rand?
link |
I can talk about nice things about her all day.
link |
I own her copy of the Fountainhead, you know.
link |
What to you is Ayn Rand's best idea, one that you find impactful, insightful, useful for
link |
us in modern society that you think about?
link |
That your life has meaning and productive work is your highest value.
link |
And that you shouldn't apologize, and this is something I despise, you shouldn't apologize
link |
for saying, I want to be happy and I'm going to work toward that.
link |
And that, there's a few others, that you owe nobody else, some random stranger, a second
link |
You see this a lot on Twitter and social media, people like demanding a debate or demanding
link |
you act a certain way and engage with them.
link |
You don't owe them anything.
link |
So I think those are some of her best ideas.
link |
And she teaches you how to think.
link |
Ayn Rand does not have all the answers, but she has all the questions.
link |
Do you think, what do you think about the whole selfishness thing?
link |
I mean, are you triggered by the word selfishness?
link |
It's really unfortunate what she does because you were just talking earlier about Moldbug
link |
being carelessly, this is indefensible in my opinion.
link |
So she talks about the virtue of selfishness and she claims that when people talk about
link |
selfishness, they mean concern primarily with the self, they don't.
link |
When people talk about selfishness, they mean in a sociopathic way, concern exclusively
link |
They mean like, oh, if someone is dying on the street, I'm not going to even waste a
link |
second saving them because I'm selfish.
link |
So she sets up this complete caricature of the term.
link |
When she's attacking selflessness in her best sense is when there are people who have no
link |
sense of self, they have no values of their own, they have no goals of their own, everything
link |
that's in their mind is gotten secondhand from the culture at large and there's nothing
link |
unique or special from their perspective worth fighting for.
link |
So when she attacks, when she advocates for the self, she basically means self development,
link |
self improvement and achievement.
link |
So I think that word choice is really false and needlessly off putting.
link |
Yeah, controversial perhaps for the purpose of being controversial, I don't know, but
link |
it's just, it's not accurate.
link |
That's not what people mean by selfishness.
link |
Yeah, I would say it's one of the reasons probably her philosophy is not as much adopted
link |
or thought about is like, it's funny, like the use of words means something.
link |
Exactly as you said, that's my criticism, I mentioned small bug, which could be incorrect
link |
criticism by the way, so I'm not exactly sure.
link |
Can we talk about some modern day chaos and politics?
link |
Speaking of your hatred for chaos, let's talk about secession.
link |
Oh yeah, I was the first one on this trip.
link |
Yeah, you were, well, the Civil War beat you to it, but.
link |
Sure, in contemporary times.
link |
In contemporary times you were, you're on this.
link |
Can you talk about what is the idea of secession, what are the odds that it might happen, what
link |
does it mean for the United States in some way for different states to secede?
link |
Sure, America's been one country with several cultures since the beginning.
link |
There's absolutely no reason for someone, this goes back to the anarchist idea, if you
link |
despise Donald Trump, which is your prerogative, if you think Joe Biden is a clown, which is
link |
your prerogative, there's absolutely no reason for you to be governed by someone you disapprove
link |
This is an incoherent, nonsensical concept.
link |
The only reason we even take it as a hypothesis is that we're trained to the contrary since
link |
A secession, I don't know along what lines, but increasingly it's becoming harder and
link |
harder for people to have conversations.
link |
I think social media, and this is something people despise social media for, I think this
link |
is something that social media has done well, which I'm advocating for, is it tends to
link |
kind of run through ideas through like an evolutionary process and drive them to the
link |
logical conclusion.
link |
So it's very hard to be a moderate online because there's going to be people pushing
link |
through your ideas through several cycles, and then you're going to end up at some kind
link |
of more pure, or if you want to dislike it, extreme perspective.
link |
Having these different pockets, it's not really governable because people fundamentally have
link |
different worldviews.
link |
So I don't know what secession would look like.
link |
I think the number is really increasing at an exponential rate.
link |
I do not think the number of supporters.
link |
I think the claim that this can only be accomplished through violence is false.
link |
Just like any divorce doesn't have to involve beating your ex husband or ex wife.
link |
And I'm very much looking forward to this becoming a reality far quicker than I ever
link |
Do you think there's a value of competing worldviews being forced to be in the same
link |
Yes, but within a context.
link |
So we can agree if group one thinks A, B, and C are the fundamental aspects of the worldview
link |
and argue within that, and group two thinks D, E, and F and argue within that.
link |
So you're going to have a lot of argument within those space.
link |
And if there's fundamental differences in worldview, there's no reason to be, especially
link |
when each views the other as completely coherent and unreasonable.
link |
Do you think there's a line of fundamentally different worldviews along which a secession
link |
will happen in the United States?
link |
Is there something that emerges to you as a set of ideas that are like, what do you
link |
That you can't come to an agreement over?
link |
Yeah, I think that's already happening.
link |
Like with the masks, I think there's just two fundamental perspective and each one thinks
link |
the other is insane and also deadly and destructive.
link |
And I don't see how there's any discourse on this topic.
link |
So on the left, I wouldn't say it's left versus right.
link |
I think it's people who are pro risk versus people who are risk averse.
link |
Yeah, so risk averse.
link |
And then there's like a hope for the comfort of the sort of a centralized science giving
link |
the truth and then everybody must follow the truth of the proper way to behave.
link |
And then there's on the other side, a distrust of any kind of centralized institutions of
link |
anybody who might use like control to try to gain greater and greater power and masks
link |
are a symbol of that.
link |
And even if masks are or are not a effective way of stopping the virus, which is really
link |
unfortunate to me from a perspective, I happen to be on a survey paper about masks.
link |
Like people don't seem to care about the data or the so on.
link |
This has become just a nice point on which to then highlight the difference between the
link |
Yeah, that's really interesting.
link |
I mean, it sounds kind of on the face kind of ridiculous that the succession would occur
link |
It wouldn't, but I'm saying this is an example of something where there's a clean break.
link |
And risk averse versus someone who's risk seeking, these are just two fundamentally
link |
different perspectives.
link |
Do you want to have an NHS or do you have one of a market based healthcare system?
link |
You can make very valid arguments for both.
link |
There's no reason for everyone to be under one.
link |
But do you think that's not something that's, you think that's irreconcilable, if that's
link |
the word, that that's not in the space of ideas that you can have in the same room together
link |
and they fight at each other and ultimately make progress like that.
link |
That succession is the more effective way to proceed forward.
link |
But do you see a possible world with no is the answer, meaning I know you say yes, because
link |
you kind of lean on the side of freedom and anarchism.
link |
Like you make, you want to make, let me make an argument in terms of divorce, which is
link |
in your worldview or your intuition is you want to make secession as frictionless as
link |
And not just like states or whatever, just like you want to choose, you want to be free.
link |
Let me make my authoritarian, Russian, okay, Papa Stalin argument in terms of relationships.
link |
Like when shit goes wrong in a relationship.
link |
That's your language.
link |
There's only a place for one Stalin at this table.
link |
I'll get to be Lenin.
link |
Or you get to be like Merkel as our previous discussion with Putin.
link |
Don't let me unleash the hounds.
link |
You know, you want to work through some of the troubles before you get divorced.
link |
Like you want to do the work in relationships sometimes, like it goes up and down.
link |
It's been 200 plus years.
link |
But in the, listen, okay, so it's not a one night stand, but you know.
link |
This I don't see the middle ground.
link |
He's either a complete calamity buffoon, or he's been the first great president we've
link |
had in like many, many years.
link |
So you think that there's something different now than it was 20 years ago?
link |
Social media and access to information.
link |
And the division will only increase, you think?
link |
So Trump is not an accident of history.
link |
So they thought Trump was the river, but he was the dam.
link |
Trump was the dam.
link |
They thought he was the river.
link |
So in that analogy, Trump being gone makes things worse.
link |
For that perspective, because now things are really going to hit the fan.
link |
So what are the odds of secession?
link |
And my desperate hope is that it's peaceful, but I think the number of people who are becoming
link |
very comfortable with the violence is making me very unsettled.
link |
So I see words as violence and your Twitter.
link |
It's like Hiroshima times a million.
link |
Sometimes I curl up in the corner crying after I check your Twitter feed.
link |
So in all seriousness, you think it's possible to do nonviolent secession?
link |
It's like a Czechoslovakia.
link |
Brexit was a secession.
link |
Right, so you can have a civil war did not need to be fought.
link |
That would have been a nonviolent secession.
link |
And if you worry about slavery, you could have bought off all the slaves, import them
link |
It still would have been cheaper and less loss of life and probably better for race
link |
I don't know enough history to, to wonder about like how the civil war could have been
link |
Well, that's how is a well conversation.
link |
If they want to secede, say, look, here's what we're going to do.
link |
We're going to let you secede, but you have to end slavery.
link |
They seceded because of slavery.
link |
Here's the other thing.
link |
There's like this, some circles of conservatism have this myth that, oh, it wasn't about slavery,
link |
it was about state's rights.
link |
Well, if you go back, every state, when they seceded, released the press release.
link |
And they said explicitly, we're doing this because of slavery.
link |
So that is an abomination that needs to be taken care of.
link |
But other countries have ended slavery peacefully.
link |
One of the ways to do it is pay them by all, and we ended up doing this after the war.
link |
I think the South people got reparations, the slave owners, it was just insane.
link |
You want to go to Canada, whatever.
link |
And that's our peace treaty.
link |
Because the people who died weren't the slave owners.
link |
It was white trash.
link |
And it was, that's who always, and I hate that that's the term, I can't think of a better
link |
one, but that's who always ends up fighting these wars often disproportionately.
link |
It's poor people and uneducated people.
link |
And I don't, I did not regard them as cannon fodder.
link |
I think it's horrible.
link |
So what would it look like?
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There would be two founding documents?
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Yeah, they had their constitution.
link |
Actually, I don't know the history of that.
link |
Yeah, they had a constitution, but it was much more decentralized.
link |
If secession doesn't happen, you said that Donald Trump was the dam, not the river.
link |
That sounds like Walt Whitman or something.
link |
Are you flirting with me?
link |
You know us, we don't flirt.
link |
We just club and drag you to the cave.
link |
We hammer and sickle.
link |
And you don't want to know about the sickle.
link |
It's not good cob, bad cob.
link |
It's bad cup for a sickle.
link |
What do you think 2024 looks like in terms of the candidates?
link |
It's going to be Kamala Harris as the Democratic candidate.
link |
I'm really looking forward to Ted Cruz versus Mike Pence, because they're both very good
link |
That would be interesting to see how they differentiate themselves.
link |
But honestly, I don't, I mean, things are going to get really ugly really soon.
link |
What about Donald Trump coming back?
link |
He's not going to do it.
link |
So things, in my opinion, I think things are going to be really, really crazy in 2021.
link |
And talking about the dam being gone, like 2021.
link |
So this year coming up.
link |
It's going to be complete.
link |
It's going to be complete mayhem.
link |
What do you think, like prediction wise, and this is empirical.
link |
What do you think Donald Trump's Twitter feed looks like in 2021?
link |
Like if we're at the end of 2021, we'll look back and see like, what was the, you know,
link |
Obama gate exclamation points or we won.
link |
He is going to be, for the first time in history, holding the Republican party accountable to
link |
We've never had that happen before.
link |
I think he's going to be holding their feet to the fire, radicalizing them.
link |
And given that they have the Senate, where it's going to be 50 50, the Democrats have
link |
a three seat majority in the House.
link |
This is not a governing coalition for either.
link |
It's going to be complete mayhem.
link |
What does that actually look like?
link |
What are the key values you think that he's going to try to push?
link |
I think it's just going to be very contrarian.
link |
He's going to be holding them accountable in terms of budgeting, even though he never
link |
did that as president.
link |
I think in terms of some kind of nominations, here's the thing.
link |
This is the first time since Nixon, 50 years and things weren't as politicized then, where
link |
an incoming president doesn't have control of the Senate.
link |
The Senate has the vote over cabinet positions.
link |
I do not see a possibility of them not trying to pick a fight on one or two of these nominations.
link |
And especially as revenge for Kavanaugh.
link |
This is going to get very bloody very quickly.
link |
And I think Mitch McConnell, there's a sadistic side to him.
link |
He revels in being the brakes on the car.
link |
And I think the base, it's just going to be throwing just, they're going to want some
link |
It's like, oh yeah, we eliminated this one person.
link |
So that's going to get really ugly really quickly.
link |
You see it being quite divisive, like the division increasing, not stabilizing or decreasing.
link |
And I'll be doing my part.
link |
I know you'll be doing my part, but I'm trying to do my part and like trying to be like,
link |
to me, the division is shouting over people like Elon Musk, people who are actually building
link |
stuff and like accomplishing things in this world in terms of like.
link |
Elon said he took the red pill.
link |
No, see, you're talking about the, I'm talking about, forget Elon, SpaceX and Tesla and actually
link |
the good sides of like some of the things that Google is doing.
link |
Like actually building things, like making the world's information searchable, all that
link |
Like all this stuff, you know, making actually the world a better place.
link |
There's a bunch of technologies that are increasing our quality of life.
link |
All this, all that kind of stuff.
link |
I feel like they get like not much credit or in our public discourse because of the
link |
The division is just like, it's clouding our ability to concentrate on what's awesome about
link |
Well, you know what would eliminate the division, right?
link |
See, I don't, I don't, it's hard for me to disagree.
link |
It's hard for me to disagree because, but at the same time, succession, I'm a romantic
link |
at heart and divorce breaks my heart.
link |
But do you want to live in a country where Joe Rogan is regarded as an example of someone
link |
who's spreading white supremacy?
link |
Well, but see, I feel like that's not the country we live in.
link |
The New York Times did it, the cathedral does it on a regular basis.
link |
Well, the cathedral is, okay, the cathedral, I guess you can maybe define the cathedral,
link |
but it's like the centralized institutions that have like a story that they're trying
link |
to sell and so on.
link |
Yeah, this is mold books concept, but yeah, they basically are set the limits of permissible
link |
discourse and create a narrative for the population to follow.
link |
But to me, that's a minority of people.
link |
Yeah, minorities always controlling everything in any country, the vast majority of the masses
link |
But minorities can be overthrown and the.
link |
Sure, the circulation of the elites, yeah.
link |
The way the, no, no, no, and that's why the, what progress looks like is ridiculous people
link |
And then they get annoying and new ridiculous people that are a little bit better overthrow
link |
No, I think progress happens despite the people who are in power, not because of them.
link |
And so why is this a succession?
link |
So is it always about overthrowing the powerful?
link |
Is that how progress happens?
link |
No, I think progress happens despite the powerful.
link |
The powerful are going to do what's in their power to maintain their power and they're
link |
going to fight innovation because it's a threat to their control.
link |
There's always going to be the New York Times of the world, right?
link |
There's always going to be those, those people that haven't heard.
link |
Sure, let them have their own country.
link |
So it's two countries.
link |
One has Joe Rogan, the other one has the New York Times.
link |
That's basically what's happening right now.
link |
It just geographically doesn't map out very well, but culturally, yes.
link |
But that's just cultural stuff.
link |
Like there's a layer of public discourse.
link |
I don't mean like that's what we're operating under now, but there's actual like progress
link |
being made, like roads being built, hospitals being run, all those kinds of things like
link |
different innovations.
link |
That seems like secession is counterproductive to that.
link |
Right, because one country would have all the roads and the other would have all the
link |
That's a great point.
link |
No, that's not, that's not the point I'm trying to make.
link |
It's just like, it just feels like the division that we're experiencing in the space of ideas
link |
could be constructive and productive for, for building better roads and better hospitals
link |
as opposed to like using that division to separate the countries.
link |
They're all going to have to solve the same problems, it feels like.
link |
Sure but they can solve them differently and compete that way.
link |
Mass is a great example.
link |
We're seeing that right now.
link |
Different countries have different mass mandates and things like this.
link |
And the competition within the same structure, within the same founding documents and same
link |
institutions is not effective, you think?
link |
As effective as separating.
link |
It is effective but there is a certain point, which I think we have long passed, where there
link |
is not a governing consensus ideologically or culturally.
link |
Let me ask you a fun question, okay?
link |
So, there is a kind of captivating notion that we might, I'm excited by it, the human
link |
being stepping foot on Mars.
link |
That to me is, it's like one of those things that feels like it's, why do we want to engage
link |
in space exploration?
link |
But I'm a little bit with Elon Musk on this, which is, it's obvious that eventually if
link |
human species is to survive, it's going to have to innovate in ways that includes the
link |
Like, there's a lot of things we're not able to predict yet that if we push ourselves to
link |
the limits of space, like new ideas will come that'll be obvious a hundred years from now
link |
and then we're not even imagining now.
link |
And colonizing Mars, that idea that seems ridiculous, exceptionally difficult, impossibly
link |
expensive is something that is actually going to be seen as obvious in retrospect and that
link |
we should engage in.
link |
That's just to contextualize things.
link |
The fun idea and experiment from a philosophical and political sense is what kind of government,
link |
how do you orchestrate a government when you go to Mars, like we don't get too many chances
link |
like this, but how do you build new systems, not in place of old ones, but in a place with
link |
no system previous have existed?
link |
I think organically, I hate that word, but that's the correct word.
link |
You would have to figure out, I mean, that's how America was built.
link |
You had the, it was a Jamestown colony and they tried to do communism here and it completely
link |
failed and they went to a more free market system with the second wave of colonists is
link |
For Mars, I mean, it depends on the population, who the population was, the number of people.
link |
These are all kind of hypotheticals that I don't really have any good insight in whatsoever.
link |
I'm not a space person.
link |
So a lot of people look up to the stars and they're filled with awe and wonder about the
link |
mystery of the universe and you look up to the stars and you feel what?
link |
I'm not looking up.
link |
I'm looking at the earth.
link |
If you look at what's, I'd much rather given a choice between Mars and the deep sea.
link |
I'd much rather spend a week at the deep sea and all the life forms that are down there
link |
because they're literal aliens.
link |
It's like things that are not literal, but they're unimaginable to us.
link |
Some of the things down there.
link |
Yeah, that's true.
link |
To me, it's an interesting thought experiment to see when you have 10 people, when you have
link |
a hundred people, how do you build an effective, you know, this is actually really useful for
link |
How do you build an effective company that does things?
link |
It's not an obvious, despite everybody being really certain about everything in this, in
link |
this modern world, to me, it's not obvious, like how do you run successfully as a group
link |
That's what I'm saying.
link |
It also organic means you have to look at who the people are and tailor the organization
link |
to them as opposed to try to impose something.
link |
But you get to also select people.
link |
Cause it's not going to be open borders on Mars.
link |
I was going to say when you have one country, it's all open borders.
link |
Yeah, you're right.
link |
They're from outer space, right?
link |
Some say they're aliens already there.
link |
So you're going to have to negotiate that.
link |
So we're aliens to somebody.
link |
We're legal aliens.
link |
Do you think there's alien civilizations out there?
link |
What do you think is their system of government anarchism?
link |
Cause they're advanced.
link |
Do you honestly think there's intelligent life forms out there?
link |
It's impossible that there isn't.
link |
So what do you make of all the stories of UFO sightings, all that kind of stuff?
link |
Do you think they've visited earth?
link |
My grandfather was an air traffic controller in the Soviet Union and he said they would
link |
often see these things that were not operating the way we knew vehicles operate.
link |
So that's good enough for me.
link |
So I mean, do you think government is in possession of some, like, what do you think government
link |
is doing with this kind of information?
link |
Do you think somebody has any understanding of UFO sightings or any kind of information
link |
about extraterrestrial life forms that are not known to the public?
link |
That's indisputably true.
link |
I think the fact that so many of these sightings are from aerodynamic professionals, like
link |
pilots and things of that nature, they are people who've seen it all, who are reputable.
link |
If they are on record saying, I've seen things that don't make sense, and both the Russians
link |
and the Americans thought it was the other one, that says something.
link |
Shouldn't that be a bigger problem?
link |
Shouldn't that be bigger news and a bigger problem if government is in fact hiding it?
link |
I guess, but like, what are they going to do with that information?
link |
It's a good question.
link |
Like, if a UFO, if an extraterrestrial spacecraft, which most likely would be like a crappy space,
link |
like it wouldn't be the actual aliens, it would be like some drone probe ship.
link |
So if that, like, what would you do with that information?
link |
As somebody that's in charge of, you know, like you see how badly WHO fumbled the discussion
link |
Masks is one of them, but everything really in terms of communicating with the public
link |
honestly about what they know, what they don't know.
link |
And that's a trivial one.
link |
I don't, I don't, I don't know.
link |
There certainly feel incompetent at being able to communicate effectively with the public
link |
about something much more difficult, much more full of mystery, like a UFO, a thing,
link |
a piece of material that's out of this earth.
link |
Forget like organic material.
link |
I don't, I don't know.
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To me, I just, so from a scientist perspective, it would be beautiful.
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It would be inspiring to reveal this to the world.
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Here's the mystery and make it completely public.
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Share it with China.
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Share it with everybody.
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I think there is a domino effect where the concern would be what else are you hiding
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And at that point, if you said, no, no, no, this is everything, people wouldn't believe
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you and they would, you can't blame them for not believing them.
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And then it'd be like, show us the aliens.
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They'd be like, we don't have them.
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We just have the craft.
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Speaking of aliens, offline, you mentioned elves.
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What do you think about psychedelics in terms of the kind of places that can take your mind?
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The kind of journey it can take you on.
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Like what do you think, what do you think the psychedelics do to the human mind and
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what does that say about the capacity of the human mind and just in general, like the mysteries
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of all that's out there?
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I don't know that we understand what they do.
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The way I heard it explained to me is that much of the human mind isn't about receiving
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information but blocking information, right?
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Because we're so, there's so much data coming in any moment that you basically have to train
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yourself to see and to hear only what you want to see and to hear.
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And that what psychedelics do is they tear that away and suddenly you're much more aware
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of what's out there and also you're going to be noticing patterns that you hadn't noticed
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I know you had that researcher on the show and he kind of discussed this at some length.
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I mean, Rogan is probably the person who popularized DMT more than, well, he's obviously the person
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who's popularized DMT more than anything.
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I don't know anyone who had, even the researchers who have anything close to a coherent explanation
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of why this drug, which exists everywhere, would have this very specific, very extreme
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effect on so many people who are going to be experiencing such bizarre consequences
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as a result of it.
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I think it's very interesting that this is talking about the government, you know, the
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CIA started experimenting with LSD, they killed one of their own people, drove them to suicide
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and there was a lot of research into, Terrence McKenna talks about this, into this field
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and then very quickly, once it got into the mainstream, they shut it down, even though
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it's not addictive, it doesn't cause you to go crazy or anything like that and there was
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a lot of propaganda against its use, which I think, thankfully, is now somewhat receding.
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I think Colorado just legalized mushrooms, something like that and I think it'll be very
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interesting to see what happens as a result of this.
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Yeah, and the interesting thing is, there doesn't seem to be, for certain psychedelics
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like psilocybin, like mushrooms, there doesn't seem to be a lethal dose, which is fascinating,
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like Matthew Johnson, the Hopkins professor that you mentioned, I'm definitely going to
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do one of his studies, it's a really cool way to do what he calls a heroic dose of psilocybin.
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Oh, I want to do it, what do I have to do?
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A heroic dose, holy crap.
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Yeah, but it's safe.
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How many grams are we talking?
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I don't know, but it's just, it's big.
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This is going to have a kick.
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He says that, I mean, he also studies cocaine, he studies all kinds of drugs and he's like,
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the psilocybin is...
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A heroic dose of cocaine kills you.
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You can't, so you can't even come close, so he says the problem with studying cocaine
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is you have people who are addicted to cocaine or war or so on, you give them the kind of
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doses that we can and part of the study is like, it's nothing to them.
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Psilocybin is the only one where even daily users or regular users are blown away by the
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dose they give them.
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So you can go to Russia in your mind, you can go to outer space, maybe you'll become
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an astronaut or astronomer after all.
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Maybe I'll be Baba Yaga.
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I'll let people look that one up.
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What do you think this thing is like our attachment to other human beings?
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And is it something that we should give to just a few people?
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Yes, that's for sure.
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When I was working with DL Hughley in his book, he didn't use the term, but he was describing
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like low key depression.
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And he talked about how he was in the airport and he noticed a girl had a red dress and
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he went up and thanked her and she was like, what are you thanking for?
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And he had realized he hadn't registered color in like weeks.
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And I think love is like that when you see someone and you just like, oh, like your eyes
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Like this is something I've never seen before or I want more of this, that kind of thing.
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It really disorients and reorients your thinking.
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Don't you find that like the world is full of that like nonstop?
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It's not just like a person either.
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Yes, but when it's in a person, it's a whole other level because it's like, I could have,
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this is going to be great for years.
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It's like, you know, every day it's something new.
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I mean, that is, and that is rare.
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You think it's rare?
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Find someone who you could talk to them for years and not run out of things to talk to.